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Tom Showdown (Tom Off) - Round 1

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Here���s an ANIMORPHS animation pitch I made last summer! Created it for a lot of different personal and professional reasons, but now I’m happy to share!

LONG POST

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What Do We Do With A Hungry Taxxon? (Hey Ho, Feed The Taxxons)

Adapted from "What Do We Do With A Drunken Sailor" by Sarifel Lyrics rearranged August 7th, 2025

What do we do with a hungry Taxxon What do we do with a hungry Taxxon What do we do with a hungry Taxxon Early in the mornin?

Hey ho, feed the Taxxons Hey ho, feed the Taxxons Hey ho, feed the Taxxons Early in the mornin!

Take'em to the beach to catch some grouper, Let'em dig up a bunch of tubers, Wander the hills and catch a cougar, Early in the mornin!

Hey ho, feed the Taxxons (3x) Early in the mornin!

Order them a stack of large pizza pies, Get'em a burger and a bunch of french fries, Hope there's no instant oatmeal surprise Early in the mornin!

Hey ho, feed the Taxxons (3x) Early in the mornin!

Let'em eat all the wounded Henchmen, Maybe take a bite out of angry Frenchmen, Or any other foods that you could mention, Early in the mornin!

Hey ho, feed the Taxxons (3x) Early in the mornin!

If they're diggin tunnels all through the planet And they're so hungry they cannot stand it Let'em have a bite at an Andalite Bandit Early in the mornin!

Hey ho, feed the Taxxons (3) Early in the mornin!

Hey ho, feed the Taxxons (3) Early in the mornin!

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When everything's made to be broken

I just want you to know who I am

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An older comic from when I used to work at Build-A-Bear

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inspired by my bitchass brother

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[“Allow me to be perfectly clear about this: one of the cruelest things you can do is to tell someone that they are ineligible for love because of mental illness. Yet this is something that happens all the time. In a discussion about this idea, upon hearing that I believed people who were dealing with mental illness should not face constant messaging that they aren’t allowed to pursue relationships, an acquaintance launched into a vehement argument for the right of communities to exclude people who may be “toxic.” Simply hearing the idea that mentally ill people should get love too made this person feel like he had to protect his community from the invading mentally ill masses. As he argued this point, all I could think was how people in this man’s community must feel like they could not step out of line, have problems, or be less than fun.

The upshot is that the circumstances the folks living with mental illness navigate in order to feel worthy of love often require them to act “as if.” As if they were healthy, as if their needs were being met, as if they were okay with things that they may not be okay with. There is a pressure to lessen the impact of your disorder on others, to shrink it down, and by extension to shrink yourself down. The less you that shows up, the less voice you have, and the less control you have over your circumstances. To the outside world you may look like a consenting partner, but when you only feel safe voicing one-quarter of your feelings, what is filling in that other three-quarters? Whose voice is that? Are you really giving your own consent, or are you simply giving the answer you know someone else wants to hear? The answer that causes the least trouble?

Going with the flow is not consent. Trying to be unobtrusive is not consent. Being afraid to bother anyone with your problems is not consent. Not wanting to cause drama is not consent. Not wanting to be a buzzkill is not consent. Not wanting your luck to run out with the awesome partner who is with you in spite of your mental illness is not consent. Not wanting the hot partner you’ve just met to think you’re high maintenance is not consent. Hiding yourself to make someone else’s life easier is not consent.

Yet we, in ways both implicit and explicit, ask the mentally ill to do these things all the time. The message is sent that certain people—cool, easygoing, fun people who don’t cause trouble—are lovable, and that not fitting those criteria is inherently problematic, so those who don’t should do something about it. Cover up that illness, don’t let it show, and if it’s too late, if we’ve seen it, have the good grace to be sufficiently grateful for any bones tossed your way, and then remember that you are on notice, on borrowed time, because you are lucky, and luck runs out, luck can be pressed, and you probably shouldn’t press yours.

If we want to say “yes means yes” and make it mean more than “no means no,” we need to go beyond the words to the lives that are shaping them. Someone who feels indebted to their partner, lucky to have them, in danger of losing them is not delivering the same yes they would to an equal. Someone who feels like it’s not safe to show their true self, that they need to repress, hide, or stifle themselves lest they be cast out for being dramatic, may not say yes for the same reasons they would were they living out loud.

We can start to change this dynamic by changing the way we look at mental illness and the mentally ill. First off, understand that given the choice most mentally ill people would not be living with a mental illness. Working from that understanding, decouple people from their illness—your partner and their illness are not one; they are more like an ongoing wrestling match. Two entities locked together but separate. This new understanding allows you to see how you can enter the right to join your partner’s team rather than stand off against your partner and their depression. Now you are working together. Rather than becoming your partner’s adversary whom they have to protect themselves from or caretaker whom they are indebted to, you are their equal with whom they can negotiate. We need to stop infantilizing and desexualizing the mentally ill and start relating to them as competent people capable of making their own choices. This allows everyone to be open, honest, and communicative. People dealing with illness can enter relationships being truthful about it, and partners can join them as allies.”]

joellen notte, from sex and love when you hate yourself and don’t have your shit together, from ask: building consent culture, edited by kitty stryker, 2017

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Would you have anything to say on dealing with the shame of having betrayed myself and my beliefs, or having been “weak”? I didn’t realise how far what I was doing with someone I thought I cared about was just buying into a system that placed me at the bottom of it, in the expectation of drawing them into relating to me via that, until very late in the game

depends on how you feel about people who are weak and what technologies are available to deal with that much shame. to me, those moments when you end up betraying your values or acting against your image of yourself are landmarks in that they differentiate between areas of your internal landscape; it’s impossible to act within one’s values at all times but it is possible to look at the map of one’s behaviors and beliefs and holistically decide where to go from there. that involves examining what you genuinely needed from those interactions where you betrayed your values and how to better serve those needs in the future. passed my phone off to c and she added that part of the grieving process when it comes to grappling with your past choices is grieving that lost world where you did everything right and no one got disappointed in you, as well as the better circumstances that could have prevented the value betrayal in the first place. good luck!

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(same anon from previous message) it feels like the feelings of disappointment (from myself and from others) are particularly difficult to move through, even with time and resolution to the situation, and this feels connected to the “grieving the lost world where i made the right choices” problem. is there any way out but to accept that i’ll continue to feel this way for a long time?

the thing about those big moments that feel unresolved and packed full of shame and disappointment and incomprehensible meaning is they they’re spirals. the forces at work within them will appear over and over and over again, the same lessons will show up over and over again, the needs and fears that drove your decisions will show up again. a miracle would have had to happen to reach you before you made those particular choices, but that miracle shows up again and again just like everything else. Sometimes if you’re careful and lucky and observant you can spot it and shift the spiral onto a different loop. Maybe you encounter someone who reminds you of back then and you get to graciously intercede in the exact way that was needed before, or maybe all you get to do is watch with horror and compassion and try to learn something from it. Either way it’s always going to come back around again.

It sounds unbearably woo, but it’s true— the times in your life when you betray your values and bitterly disappoint yourself are guardians. They mark the boundaries of what you stand for. If you’re willing to dive into the meat of what happened and why, they’ll give you information that can help connect you to others and help you collectively deal with the circumstances that create choices like these. Odin had to hang himself on a tree and give up an eye for that kind of knowledge, Prometheus and his liver have to hang out with an eagle for eternity. You’re in good company, so have fun.

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women get so pissed and flustered when you read to them as another woman and you ask them not to touch you, it’s like you’re stabbing their fantasy of the divine cisterhood to death in front of them

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Hi! I appreciate your insights and book quotes a lot, they give me a lot of things to reflect on, so I wanted to ask for your perspective.

I'm currently trying to get past my own learned helplessness and fear of making mistakes. I am very passive and freeze up the more important something is in my mind, and it takes ages to thaw out and actually do anything. And while I have made plenty of progress over the years (that poor kid I remember being, damn), I feel like I need to go deeper now. I just dissociated for most of this month because the fear took over, and I didn't know how to cope except relying on escapism again. I try to be good to myself, but I don't want to hide in a bubble all my life either. The only "solution" I can think of is just forcing myself to keep trying until I get it right, but that hardly ever worked on me in the past, and it's partly why I'm in this mess to begin with. Do you know of any books or have any advice on how I go about breaking my current thought pattern and gaining a healthier outlook?

Hope u have a nice day!

practice! and freezing a lot. and thawing. then freezing again. applying force, shame, coercion, guilt, or obligation will just churn lots of silt into the water and make it harder to do your work. there’s so much stillness and watching involved, which is different than freezing.

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I’ve been through a lot of violence and after I escaped the first round I never abandoned myself again, but recently I did. And my personality split into a million parts and fugues… I know logically how much pain will be on the other side of me grieving and re integrating and I’m scared itll kill me. Because I self abandoned and split it feels like there’s no justice for the violence because I haven’t even got to keep myself and my impulses to care and do things differently. Any advice on what I can read or what supports could help?

I mean this is all a pretty standard reaction to traumatic stress including “recovering will kill me/recovery will betray the damage.” It all feels very logical but it isn’t: it’s just you making up for the agency you didn’t feel you had before.

Ellen Bass, Peter Levine, Tamala Floyd are a couple of good names to look up, but therapy, emotional work, and human connection are how people have moved on for a long time. I also always liked what Kai Cheng Thom wrote about how trauma isn’t special. Feeling special or unique in the midst of all this doesn’t help at all.

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kai cheng thom, from her collection a place called no homeland

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the concept of avoiding whole genres of music. scared of unfamiliar sounds. patterns of noise. girl. bump some slipknot. stop shivering.

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The Exposed (Animorphs #27)

Dialogue reformatted but otherwise unedited because this bit gave me such ‘dumb shit teenagers say on discord’ vibes

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Therapy would be so good if it were good

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Thinking about how people are denied the usage of their AAC device in mental health facilities.