#grison-in-space

[hazard-and-friends]

What is your favorite kind of dog to train as an instructor without wanting to keep yourself?

after some contemplation, pitties. (generalizations ahoy, not all pitties etc etc)

why I don't want them: my home is just not a good home for most pits (two other dogs, a cat = drama), as much as I love pits they don't fire me up the way herdy things do, I'm happy to foster but not keep them

why I love them: they're so fucking HAPPY. even the anxious ones are usually happy under the anxiety. they're happy to work with you because we're doing things together!!!!! and often with rescue pitties and their new humans I also get to help them make that lightbulb connection, "my behavior can change things??? holy shit i can MAKE TREATS HAPPEN!?!?!??!?!?!" and it's so delightful.

pitties were put on this earth to have a good time, and by god they are going to accomplish that.

[firelightfoxes]

fwiw, speaking as someone who is not in Mudis, who missed your critical OP, and who then had to backtrack to figure out what pissed off your anon so bad and check? and, on top of that, someone who is not young, and who knows exactly what toxic shit can swirl in dog breed communities?

you're totally being reasonable there. everything in my networks I've heard about Mudis--not just from you or even from the Internet--tells me I would want to be even more careful selecting a dog based on temperament than I am with my ACDs. I don't know that conformation would be my first choice for testing a more solid temperament, but the reasons you list for looking for it are sound and it's hard to think of another activity in which dogs are asked to tolerate a stranger touching them without having to actively enjoy it (e.g. therapy work). Your anon there is actually making the breed community look way the fuck worse than your initial OP comment.

It always looks worse to badmouth someone who is making reasonable comments about problems in their home breed than it does to be the person making those critical comments in the first place. and I say this coming out of cattle dogs, which have their own nasty temperament issues (including fearfulness combined with herder mouthy == badbad) that made me very careful about picking a breeder for my dog. especially for a breed that is currently in a bit of a sport-person spotlight (like PyrSheps, koolies, kelpies, ACDs, etc before them), it's extremely important to talk about known issues in breed temperament so that people are well informed ahead of time. you want people to pick the dogs knowing full well what they're getting in for and what to look out for. transparency is a sign of a good breed community, and argument about how to achieve given goals is normal and reasonable.

anyway, good luck with Lichen! little bitey pointy dogs are great fun, and I hope you're continuing to enjoy the crap out of yours.

these are great points!! i really appreciate you sharing your perspective :) the other thing is like, if they disagreed with me they could've just started a conversation with me and i would've been happy to hear them out if they wanted to share their opinions, instead of being rude.

they're right that i am young and relatively inexperienced with the breed. but i'm also extremely dedicated to learning and i'm active in the community. if i'm wrong about things, i need to know so that i can learn and grow!

but yeah, thank you!! i love Lichen so much and she's made me want to be involved in mudis forever. <3

[the-haiku-bot]

these aus are the best

ones in the whole world and I

will not be denied

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

thanks guys

[silly-pupper-drawings]

Original photo by @grison-in-space

[Image ID: Three pictures. The one on top is a sketch of black ink on white paper. A dog lays in a partially-drawn open cardboard box. They have two large upright ears and two large black patches on their face. The front of their mouth is around the edge of the cardboard box close to their head.

The middle picture is a sketch of black ink on white paper. A close up of a dog's head is drawn. They have two large upright ears with darker edges and two large darker patches on their face. The front of their mouth is around something (a line that hides the bottom of their mouth in the drawing).

The bottom picture is a photo of a young australian cattle dog laying in an open cardboard box. She has two upright ears and two black patches on her face. The front of her mouth is around the edge of the box near her head.

End ID]

[scientia-rex]

Do you know if there's any links between chronic pain and hrt [testosterone] usage?

My chronic pain seems to get much better when I use testosterone reliably/regularly which fascinates me because I can't think of a reason it should be doing that. Have been wondering if I just got lucky or if it's part of a broader pattern :0

[No pressure to answer this if you don't want to! 👍]

Hmmmmmm I don't know! @grison-in-space, if you have time, do you have ideas? I know you know stuff.

[doberbutts]

Genuinely, what do you think we should do in regards to breeds with an oppressive history? Until we have the genuine change in the global political landscape, they're just going to breed new dogs to hunt down BIPOC. Can a breed be repurposed, reshaped, given a new purpose despite its history and its lack of direct attribution to most actively living dogs and their upbringing and training, or is it better to modify the breed as a whole, or even let certain breeds go extinct entirely?

And more importantly, how do I, as a white person with a working line GSD, make BIPOC feel more safe around her? She's anxious and her leash manners leave a lot to be desired, but we've been working on that and otherwise she's a huge derpy goofball who seems to think she's a cat a good 60% of the time and is exceedingly affectionate and friendly to most strangers of all walks of life as long as they don't show actively malicious intentions (we lived in the projects for awhile and she stopped someone who tried to break into the apartment to rape either myself or my partner, considering the stalking behavior that had been going on for weeks at that point and the amount of catcalling we both got). Is there anything I can do to help people feel safer around her?

As in my discussion with @grison-in-space- I don't really know that there is a good answer to this question. I am a BIPOC who has a breed of dog that was objectively used to oppress people as a tool of fascism- not just in Nazi Germany, but also here within my own country while they were still used as police and military dogs, as well as in countries such as India and Peru where they are still used by military and private security. I engage in a practice that, at its very early roots, was at least in part about siccing a dog on someone for my own gain. I think there will always be a level of cognitive dissonance and managing that with today's expectations of what a protective dog even can look like in this era is going to be a delicate balance at best and an active minefield at worst.

This sort of discussion is where I tend to disagree with many leftists on an issue that continues to come up again and again. I am a pacifist and, in a perfect world, there would be no more war and no more killing and no more violence and thus no more need for weapons outside of what is required to hunt and gather food. But we don't live in a perfect world, and we live in a world where the honest answer is that some people will always be treated violently. If we remove the means to defend ourselves from everyone's hands except the morally corrupt- we have condemned entire peoples to die horrible deaths (such as being torn apart by dogs). On the other hand, the presence of a weapon automatically escalates a situation, even if said weapon is never removed from holster or deployed within the situation.

I have a doberman that is taught biting is acceptable because I have survived a home invasion while I was home in part because I had a dog that made every indication that she was ready to defend her home with everything she had. My parents are pacifists who refuse to own weapons. The dog was why the guy decided he no longer wanted to be present in our house. I have had attempted break-ins while I was home, following this event. I did not have a dog at the time, and was living alone as a college student, pre-T and only sort of socially transitioned. The statistics of black people- and especially black women- suffering violence at the hands of those who desire to hurt them are bleak. So I got a dog, and I stopped going anywhere unarmed, and both of those things have protected me in the exact situations I got them for.

It is simply not lost on me that the appeal of a doberman for me, is also the appeal of a doberman for your average cop or soldier or authoritarian. A big fuck-you dog that hates everyone but its master is the wet dream of baby fascists everywhere. My dog chasing a would-be car thief down my driveway certainly solved the problem of repeated car breakins and theft, as well as some creeper behavior after said car thief was also caught peering into windows of houses, and my equally poor, but white, neighbors thanked me for the service and in fact adore my dogs as a result. The qualities that make her good at this also make her really good at being used as a weapon by those who wish to turn her against marginalized people for entertainment or profit, rather than to keep someone from taking more of my possessions out of my car when I am not in a financial place to continuously replace them.

Getting rid of these breeds- either by mass culling, legislature, or simply allowing them to go extinct- does not solve the problem of fascism, because even if we do succeed in ridding ourselves of the legacy of the German Shepherd, there are other breeds who can and will do the same thing, or a new breed will be created to do so. After all, using dogs as weapons is something we've known about since before the birth of the Roman empire, and has continued long past that empire's demise. Roman war dogs are largely extinct and their remnants (neas, corsos, etc) exist as incredibly changed from what they once were- so we just hopped to herding breeds instead of molossoids to accomplish the same task. As the existence of the doberman proves- even without the herding breeds, we can just use terriers sized up to do the same thing.

And we don't even really need dogs to do so. In videos of amazing stupidity with animal handling, I have 100% seen people using hyenas, baboons, and even male lions as animals being trained to attack, complete with the same sleeves and suits you see with dogs. The glimpses I've seen have not appeared particularly successful, of course the lack of domestication and willingness to work for a human gets in the way when dealing with wild animals, but to me that says even if we got rid of every single dog and wolf tomorrow... people would find a way to utilize a predator as a weapon. The Romans also used to use lions and bears and even boar to kill political prisoners and people who were undesireable to the empire. Not only do I think fascists would hop breeds, I think they would quickly and easily hop species if they had to.

I've also touched on this in other posts- but the question of changing a breed's purpose also comes up often in a breed that I care a lot about due to its proximity to racial prejudice. When a breed has been developed for blood sport, and blood sport has rightly been criminalized, what do we do with the dogs that are left? Do we let them die out? Do we legislate them out of existence? Do we change them entirely? Do we give them a new purpose? The relationship of black people and pit bulls has been discussed again and again by people who frankly are way smarter and better informed than me- and the way that we police and discuss pit bulls and pit bull ownership is so contingent on antiblack racism, which fascinates me as many of the original hands within the old bull-and-terrier used for blood sport were not only white but actively racist against black people themselves.

Truthfully, I don't think we have a good answer, because the solution to the problem is not the dogs. I think because the problem is not, and has never been, the dogs. Dogs are merely the vehicle for the larger societal problems of racism, fascism, authoritarianism, dictatorship, colonialism, and xenophobia. It's not about the dogs. So changing the dogs does nothing to the system, which will simply replace the dogs with something else if that option is removed from the toolbox.

As for your specific situation- take your dog to training, and be respectful of people's space when you're out and about with her, and accept that some people simply will never like her.

[jezunya]

Just rewatching the last ep today, after the initial shock of it all

I'm choosing to take that line fairly literally, since they've never used that sort of hyperbole to talk about their relationship before--Crowley said in s1 they'd been friends for six thousand years (meaning he counts their friendship as having started in Eden, not from the start of the Arrangement some 5k years later), but from the opening of s2 and Aziraphale's later comment on it, they knew each other as angels before that (and they both remember it). Who knows how long between angel!Crowley making that nebula and the Earth actually going online, since Aziraphale was talking about having seen the plans for Earth & people, not that things are already being built, much less already being populated by Adam & Eve yet.

Yeah, okay, just rewatching the opening scene now, Aziraphale says Earth "will be over there" when they "roll out that quadrant" (despite having just said they'll shut it all down in about 6k years), meaning they haven't even gotten to the corner of the universe where Earth will one day be! And we know from season 1 that that 6k timeline doesn't really start until Adam & Eve are cast out of the garden--they could have been in there, blissfully ignorant and immortal, for any amount of time before Crawly got there to tempt Eve, and any amount of time again between the War in Heaven/the Fall and Adam & Eve being created, and again between the opening angel scene & the War

So yeah, I feel like we can take the millions of years lines literally, even if they weren't really friends until Eden

"we've been talking for millions of years"

millions

not thousands

millions

they've known each other on earth for six thousand years

but millions before that

[copperbadge]

So the ADHD Handbook post struck a chord with a lot of people...

I don't think I have it in me to write the book I suggested, mainly because most of what I want to write about is variable by situation. I can't actually offer a magic formula for getting a good assessment, all I would be able to do is say "Here are the warning signs, here's my personal story, shit's just rough". Which I could do but it'd be basically an entire book of "shrug emoji". The best possible way would probably be to offer it as a workbook, like "Here is a page for you to record every communication with the clinic doing your testing. Here is a page for you to write down possible other approaches to getting your medication if the pharmacy is out." etc.

I do think I might write it as a novel of some kind. Possibly even a novel about someone writing a handbook, I haven't decided. I had a dream last night about the book, in which I saw a woman watching a revolution taking place in the distance, thinking, "This is not what I intended when I set out to write a self-help book." Baller way to start a novel, honestly.

Anyway there were several suggestions for books in the notes, so I thought I'd compile those here. I have read none of these, so I can't vouch for their contents, but I'm including what my readers said about them.

@blogquantumreality linked to How To ADHD by Jessica McCabe, who is a well-known ADHD youtuber (I haven't found her videos super helpful but they're also not aimed at me). @knitsinweirdplaces added "The last section of the How to ADHD book is literally called 'how to change the world' and exactly points out we can advocate for a more disability friendly world that traumatizes ADHDer less in the first place. It's the only book I've read that hits the balance of 'your brain has immutable challenges' and 'these strats may help' right. Bonus, it is inclusive of people who use adhd meds and those who don't/can't."

@theindefinitearticle mentioned "I read how to keep house while drowning recently and it's been much more practical for me in terms of actual usable advice." This book has also come up numerous times during National Clean Your Home Month as a helpful guide to cleaning.

@buginateacup said "The year I met my brain is the only one I've read that actually felt like it was making useful suggestions for living with ADHD."

@cabloom said "iampayingattention on Instagram wrote How Not To Fit In."

@grison-in-space said "Do you have any idea how over the top excited I was when I found I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder?"

@doubleminorforroughing wrote "Please read Devon Price. He wants to tear it all down and I love it." I will add that I don't think I've read Laziness Does Not Exist but I have read Price's shortform work extensively and I think he's been very influential in rethinking how we frame laziness and productivity in relation to both work and neurodivergence, so I can second the recommendation.

[kedreeva]

@qwertynerd97

I was reading through your guide with my fact checker. peafowl approved coding.

Also, if anyone that is a coder or artist or whatever wants to come help/talk about making this calculator (including just answering my questions), I made a channel in my discord for it. I'm working on a notations key currently and then will start on figuring out how to use that for code for a calculator.

(tagging the people who replied to the original posts that might be interested in watching or participating: @ladyrenity @grison-in-space @ospreyonthemoon (i'll message you since I know tumblr doesn't ping you anymore) @bluejaysfeathers @maira-does-stuff @daitoshi )

[fanlore-wiki]

Meta Monday: unpopular f/f opinion

This Meta Monday we're reflecting upon "unpopular f/f opinion" by grison-in-space.

"unpopular f/f opinion" is a 2018 Tumblr meta post where the author says they are tired of soft lesbians and they want to read about hard, broken, or conflicting lesbians in stories. The post garnered a large response at the time, receiving thousands of notes and sparking some discussion.

Do you agree? Or are you curious to learn more? Head over to the Fanlore page!

--

We value every contribution to our shared fandom history. If you’re new to editing Fanlore or wikis in general, visit our New Visitor Portal to get started or ask us questions here!

[spacegirlspiffy]

Something I enjoy thinking about is the way we can have such a ripple effect on people without knowing it.

For example, in the beginning of the year someone I follow reblogged a post about the MurderBot Diaries and it intrigued me. I liked the post and then promptly devoured the series.

In March I caught up with an old friend who ended up asking if I had any good book recommendations. So I, of course, suggested the series.

She, in turn, not only loved the series but recommended it to her pottery classmates. Which turned her pottery class into an also book club. Discussing themes and how the author depicts relationships and all sorts of interesting takes, which have been shared with me via my friend.

And, until this moment, I don't think @grison-in-space had any idea she's responsible for turning a pottery class into a hybrid book club. But congrats, you are!

How fun and exciting it is to think about how sharing something we enjoy can spread to others through paths we might never imagine.

[shamelesslymkp]

@grison-in-space as a kinkster I keep getting completely sideswiped by your posts as I realize partway through they're about dog training

me: huh, I've never heard of competitive obedience, I wonder how that works?

me: 'do you use a bait/treat pouch'- wait

me: ohhh, DOG dogs

[emmavonskulltaker]

Some of this depends on the plant and the person and the pots in question - I have plants that have been thriving in drainage-less pots for years, and plants that are in plastic pots that fit perfectly so the rims sit on the edge of the outer pot and there’s a large air gap underneath the plastic pot, and plants that are, like the above states, in an outer pot full of rocks.

The trick is to experiment a little with cheap hardy plants like pothos, that you can easily propagate more of, until you find what works for you and your plants. Or, if you’re not good with plants, just put your plants into an outer pot. It really is easier maintenance and takes a lot of the guesswork out. As long as you’re dumping excess water from the bottom within like 12-24 hrs of watering the plant.

Why the fuck do companies make super fancy ceramic plant pots without drainage holes. Congrats, you just made a pretty, extremely fragile plant killing receptacle

[doberbutts]

When I was younger and still lived with my parents, there was a farm down the road that had working farm corgis. We thought it was weird at first, but that's apparently what they were bred for, to herd cattle. Their tiny legs make them almost impossible for cows to kick. It was funny to watch. I figured you'd think it was interesting, since I know you like terriers and also dogs doing the jobs they were bred for. There's not a lot of working corgis these days. As far as I know, they aren't there anymore, or I would send you a video. But I think the farm was bought by a housing development, and plus it was at least a decade ago, so likely they've either passed or are enjoying their retirements on a new farmstead.

That's also why corgis are Like That. They're cattle dogs! Cattle dogs are tough cookies, they have to be, they get kicked in the face by cows. ACDs are also tough, just ask @grison-in-space

[cavka]

@grison-in-space didn't want to derail from this post even more and also i think this may have gotten too long for an ask sooo...

heavily agree on everything you've said re: chris. i'm audhd and physically disabled (though i can often hide the physical disability) and have a lot of the same thoughts and frustrations about fandom and the show. i remember when i was watching for the first time i got to the whole "he never feels sorry for himself" thing and just... sighed. a lot.

at the same time, i'm kind of grateful to the show? 'cause even if they're missing the mark a bit, i can tell they're trying. they're not shying away from giving chris' story everything it would every other character: inner conflict, learning, growing. like the fact that they gave him that mini-arc where he had multiple middle school girlfriends was huge, imo.

and it's kind of frustrating to go from that ^ to fandom. because there's a ton of flattening of his character and his struggles. like you said, kid's clearly inherited some of his dad's anxiety. there's the chess tournament but also things like him stressing out about xmas which set the trajectory for a lot of s5!eddie's arc, and him having nightmares about his mom post-tsunami and not wanting to make eddie sad. that's not even touching the fact that, despite fandom in general often bragging about the obscure and minute research it's done for fic, a lot of times it feels like people don't want to do so much as a cursory google search or wiki page skim about cp or disability in general.

which i guess circles us back around to the original post's point of "it's easier to ship these characters if a.) i can project one onto another character, b.) i just shove their kid in the background, or c.) everything is happy families and unrealistic." makes me sad. and a little mad. smad.

(also re: buck--tooootally agree with him being audhd. like the first time i watched him do the confused puppy head tilt because someone said something and he took it literally--specifically thinking things like hen's "you don't ever hear wham, bam, thank you, sir" and buck's "it doesn't rhyme..."--i was like "oh! he's mine. i'm claiming him for the audhd crowd he's so not just adhd. god it's like watching myself on tv." and it just was reinforced from there especially because of a lot of things you mention.)

(personally, i also tend to think eddie is neurodivergent but that's a whole other can of sardines.)

[anghraine]

I'm quite sure; the ones I'm thinking about explicitly state that the OP is not autistic before proceeding with the lecture about why autistic people venting on Tumblr need to do more to accommodate allistic people.

It's theoretically possible for the same arguments to be made by an autistic person (and there definitely are some annoying "as an autistic person, I perfectly understand the exact capabilities of every other autistic person" posts out there). And they would still be deeply ableist in that case, though in a more complicated way. But as far as I've seen, there's no reason to pin the blame for this one on other autistic people—it really is coming from outside the house.

There's this weird genre of post I've periodically seen that's like "It bothers me that autistic people come onto this site and vent about the pressure to accommodate mainstream social norms that seem unnatural to them, and these people just don't seem to get that mainstream social norms serve a function that makes them right and good, so 'help' consisting of pressuring autistic people into unnatural 24/7 performance is actually great. Really, autistic people need to meet the allistics halfway and accommodate us as well!"

Obviously, these posts aren't phrased this way—the style is usually more patronizingly helpful with a hint of chiding autistic strangers for venting on their own blogs about one of the most basic diagnostic criteria of autism. But the thing that always strikes me about these "helpful" explanations is how incredibly sheltered they seem.

I can't speak for all autistic people. But a lot of treatment for autism has historically been rooted in teaching autistic people to mimic "normal" behavior as much as possible. Success has often been understood less in terms of the strain of this mimicry on autistic people or how viscerally unpleasant it is for an autistic person to perform this way, and more in terms of the comfort of people around us. The less perceptible our symptoms are to other people, the greater the perception of success in most cases, although research increasingly suggests that "social camouflaging" is actively harmful to autistic people no matter how good we seem at it.

Yes, there's a reason for social norms. I know. Many of us know. We have been incessantly told this our entire lives and live under extreme pressure to adapt to the allistic world. We are under vastly more pressure to accommodate the social norms of our communities than most allistic people seem to even remotely grasp. All this "don't label yourself, it's all just a social construction" and "you're high-functioning, though, so-" and "WELL ACTUALLY it is morally incumbent on you to imitate our social norms" only makes this absolute abyss of ignorance seem all the deeper. It feels rather like Protestant proselytizers in the USA who walk up and are like "have you heard about Jesus?!" as if it is remotely possible to live in this country without hearing about Jesus.

Secondly, the idea that the weight of accommodating these different experiences should rest equally on allistic and autistic people is actually pretty grotesque—yes, even if you're talking about autistic people without specifically intellectual disabilities. Where is all this endless understanding and patience for the allistic world we're expected to develop when it comes to accommodating us? Usually completely absent, and even when we do receive some degree of empathy, it still seems incredibly unequal to the demand on us.

But even if that were not the case, the idea that ethically, the people with, you know, autism are under some moral onus to equally accommodate allistic people (especially allistic people who do not have any similar disabilities themselves, which is most of them!) is absurd. Most allistic people are more able to adapt to changing circumstances than autistic people and experience less strain from doing it, they are better and faster at correctly interpreting social situations and emotional cues, and social performance is easier and more natural for them, and they overwhelmingly outnumber autistic people. The logic here just seems absurd.

And thirdly this scary danger of "high functioning" autistic people not trying to accommodate the norms and comfort of allistic people on some broad scale is not happening. Here's one fairly clear discussion that isn't paywalled:

In fact, high-functioning ASD individuals were reported to be more aware of their communication difficulties and were more likely make considerable efforts to adjust their behavior to conventional rules of non-autistic individuals, learning to imitate other non-ASD individuals. Moreover, females reported a higher frequency of camouflaging strategies, suggesting a role of camouflaging in the gender gap of the ASD diagnosis. Although camouflaging strategies can sometimes grant a better level of adjustment, even resulting in a hyper-adaptive behavior, they are also often correlated with negative mental health consequences due to the long-term stress associated with continuous attempts to adapt in day-to-day life.

Seriously, the world being just too easy on autistic people and letting them actually show signs of being autistic (God forbid) without sufficient chiding is not a thing. It's not real in any significant large-scale way; the exact reverse is vastly more common. Annoying autistic people on Tumblr dot com are not a social problem.