capricious-passions-blog

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If there was a way to run SUPER MEGA AD BLOCKER on this website I fucking would

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i’ll get over it i just gotta be dramatic first

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Midnight Radio. Written by Ehud Lavski. Art by Yael Nathan. If you like it, please share.

Contact: elavski@gmail.com

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ok so i screenshotted this moment because i thought it was pretty cool

the first time we get to see all four elements working together for a common enemy, blah blah blah, but i started laughing because

sokka’s fucking boomerang. sokka threw a fucking boomerang at princess azula, renowned lightning bender and heir-apparent to the throne of the fire nation.

and sokka threw a boomerang at her.

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Brazilian cherries aren’t related to common cherries at all! They look like this and taste rather sour:

Also, if you’re not used to them, Brazilian grapetrees look really alien:

The fruit is formed in the trunk, not the branches!

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A merm before 10 p.m.?!?! Wow!!

Because I can’t do a drawing challenge without drawing myself at least once…

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Its so strange to spend all your teenage years thinking you’re the ugliest creature in the world. An absolute swamp goblin, if you will.

But then you stumble upon old teen photos when you’re 20 only to realise that you were never ugly? You just looked like a child. Your vision of yourself was just being manipulated by hormones, insecurity and unrealistic beauty standards.

So yeah if you’re a teenager right now and you think you’re the ugliest motherfucker in the universe you’re wrong. Wait it out for a few more years, this WILL be just a phase in your life and you will overcome it, you can do this.

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lets bring back romanticism im tired of trying to be rational. were all dumb and we all want love

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The ideal summer body is horns, fangs and wings.

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One of my beloved video game OC’s is a woman who’s convinced that she’s the terror of the galaxy and her name strikes fear into the heart of millions as some kind of scifi bandit-pirate queen.

But in reality she: Only really fights other bandits and space pirates which actually cleans up the galaxy. Would die and kill for her crew which is mostly reformed outlaws she’s given a second chance. Has strict rules about who she can or cant hurt. Steals a lot but its only ever worthless junk that only she finds appealing and actually whenever she raids a town she leaves it looking better because she took all the trash that appealed to her. And she’s saved whole worlds like, dozens of times. 

People LOVE her but they don’t say so to spare her feelings.

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might fuck around and finally write vampire fiction. vampirism with be a direct and obvious allegory for disability and mortals will call them “differently living”

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me: habibi, how does one capture on canvas the musculature of a man's back – illuminated by a strike of monsoon lightning?

my husband:

me:

my husband: is this your subtle way of asking me to go stand outside shirtless in the rain or

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I AM ABSOLUTELY LOSING MY MIND AFTER READING THIS PLEASE READ IT

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Every now and then I wonder where my glasses are, and I have to double check they're not on my shirt right under my nose.

90% of the time that's exactly where they are, and I've been walking up and down the stairs for nothing.

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values affirmation

Sarah writes:

One of the most startlingly effective things I’ve seen in the psychology literature is the power of “self-affirmation.”

The name is a bit misleading. The “self-affirmation” described in these studies isn’t looking in the mirror and telling yourself you’re beautiful.  It’s actually values affirmation — writing short essays about what’s important to you in life (things like “family”, “religion”, “art”) and why you value them. The standard control intervention is writing about why a value that’s not very important to you might be important to someone else.

Values affirmation has been found in many studies to significantly improve academic performance in “negatively stereotyped” groups (blacks, Hispanics, and women in STEM), and these effects are long-lasting, continuing up to a year after the last exercise.[1]  Values affirmation causes about a 40% reduction in the black-white GPA gap, concentrated in the middle- and low-performing students.[4]

This was startling and fascinating to me for a couple reasons. Firstly, if that’s true, that would be huge. We’ve thrown billions at the achievement gap mostly without results. 

Secondly, I’d heard ‘self-affirmation’ thrown around before, and I assumed it was sort of like generic ‘positivity’ messages - you know, “love yourself!!’ and ‘you deserve the world!’ and I find all that stuff vaguely icky. (”love yourself” is super underspecified. What does that even mean? Is it an emotion? A belief? Do I have to be able to experience it persistently? On demand?)

But values affirmation - well, values affirmation makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. Sarah continues (bolding mine):

There is a kind of personal quality that has to do with believing you are fit to make value judgments.  Believing that you are free to decide your own priorities in life; believing that you are generally competent to pursue your goals; believing that you are allowed to create a model of the world based on your own experiences and thoughts.

If you lack this quality, you will look to others to judge how worthy you are, and look to others to interpret the world for you, and you will generally be more anxious and more likely to unconsciously self-sabotage.

I think of this quality as being a free person or being sovereign.  The psychological literature will often characterize it as “self-esteem”, but in popular language “self-esteem” is overloaded with “thinking you’re awesome”, which is different.  Everybody has strengths and weaknesses and nobody is wonderful in every way.  Being sovereign doesn’t require you to think you’re perfect; it is the specific feeling that you are allowed to use your own mind.

I’ve noticed people who have this thing. I’ve aspired to be a person who has this thing, and aspired to write in a way that carves out space for other people to find this thing. I didn’t have a word for it.

I think it’s the way that a lot of social justice goes wrong. I’ve seen a lot of activism that doesn’t feel like it’s coming from a place of “I want to empower others to decide their own priorities; I want the people around me to feel competent and supported in achieving their goals; I want to build a movement that lets us take our own experiences seriously in building a model of the world.” I’ve read stuff that feels like it’s saying ‘yeah we already got the answer to that step; now do what you’re told’. 

And the research suggests that people can’t live like that, and shouldn’t.

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Team “not actually oblivious to flirting, just terrified of appearing presumptuous” represent.

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the scene in men in black where will smith’s character thoroughly explained why he shot little suzie, a cardboard cut out of a small child holding advanced physics textbooks instead of the scary aliens all around her is an excellent allegory to racism. will smith’s character, a black man, has no doubt had to deal with various authority figures assuming he is the threat when context clues could easily explain away his behavior and with that backstory in mind, it is easy to see why his character identified with aliens simply existing in the world and explained away the supposed cause for concern by using the context clues provided. on the other end of the spectrum, the white characters who all elected to shoot the aliens on sight did so for no other reason then ‘they look like a threat’, ignoring the fact that a 7 year old child out in the middle of the street alone with advanced physics textbooks should raise more eyebrows than a tentacled creature with allergies. in this essay i will