chicken-druid

[chicken-druid]

[chicken-druid]

I have some news for members of the united states armed forces who feel like they are pawns in a political game and their assignments being unnecessary.

[chicken-druid]

there’s a person who’s no longer in my life but who i still think about sometimes, who i have very complex feelings towards, because on the one hand, i find him to be a loathsome, malignant, honestly quite pathetic individual, but on the other hand, i conned myself into believing that he was, like, someone i was meant to heal—nothing speaks to me like a person who says “nobody loves me”, because i was also the person who said that, and it was always such a beautiful idea to me for two miserable rejects to connect to each other in a way that let them reject the rest of the world in turn. i knew that was an unhealthy fantasy before i even met him, but knowing something would be bad for me has rarely stopped my impulses in the past.

in the end, the problem was that he was only interested in love from certain people, and i only managed to be one of them for a very short time, many years ago now, and that time ended up being so desperately intense that we only ended up hurting each other and making each other worse. before and after that time, it was just me watching him pursue love from anyone other than me, people who were in turn pursuing love from anyone other than him. to the best of my knowledge, that’s what he’s still doing to this day. i used to hope after we stopped talking that he would get better on his own—with an implied, get better enough that he can see how good i really was, how blind he was to pursue those people when i was right there. but i honestly don’t know if i still hope that. and i honestly doubt he ever will, whether i hope it or not.

as for me, now i have a loving partner who i live with in some semblance of the life i once imagined having with him. i thought if i ever got here, i wouldn’t think of him anymore, but i still do, which means i probably always will. i think of him now because i talk about him in therapy when i try to work out why i feel like asking for anything from my partner makes me feel like a terrible person, why i have such a hard time trusting that they’re honest about their feelings rather than doing what they think they have to do to keep me around. he has probably talked about me in therapy too.

i wish i’d never met him. but, thinking about it now, i think i’d have just found some other iceberg to crash myself into in that timeline. in a sense we were probably predestined to meet like i always imagined, but only predestined by our parents not loving us right and unwittingly writing some very specific toxic relationship dynamics into our futures.

maybe in the future when i feel that pull to go find him and save him, i should redirect that energy back onto myself own younger self. we needed each other like we needed holes in our hears, but what i really needed was me, to love myself enough that i didn’t try to waste myself for someone who never had it in him to make me happy. if i think of it that way, as an opportunity to practice loving myself, it’s not so unbearable to know that i’ll never really be free of these thoughts of him for the rest or my life.

[chicken-druid]

Fresh out the egg with my big feet

[chicken-druid]

there's a bird on the conclave livestream getting his 5 minutes of fame

[chicken-druid]

Eurasian Blackcap (Sylvia Atricapilla), male, from a banding. Jerusalem Bird Observatory (JBO). 25.4.25

[chicken-druid]

American Woodcock (Scolopax minor), EAT A TASTY WORM!!!, family Scolopacidae, order Charadriiformes, Bryant Park, NYC, NY, USA

AKA Timberdoodle, Bogsucker, Mud Bat, and the Labrador Twister!

photograph by Bryan Kao

[chicken-druid]

Can't hang out in your great-uncle's den anymore. Because of woke

[chicken-druid]

Btw, that idea that privilege makes you morally evil and suffering makes you morally good is just repackaged versions of the Christian concepts of the evils of luxury and the holiness of martyrdom. Hope this helps!

[chicken-druid]

Shout out to the USA for pissing Canadians off so bad it flipped an entire election that was supposed to be a landslide for the center-right, forever in your debt o7

[chicken-druid]

You may want to know that this Nilgansito is doing just fine.

Nilgans 🐣 (Egyptian goose) im Rosensteinpark, Bad Cannstatt.

[chicken-druid]

YODA: Luke, when gone am I... the last of the Jedi will you be...except for Ahsoka Tano, Ezra Bridger, Cal Kestis, Cere Junda, Quinlan Vos,

LUKE: ...Who?

YODA: ...Gungi- the wookiee jedi kid,

LUKE: a Wookiee Jedi?? Master, isn't that a bit tireso-

YODA: NOT finished I was...Reva, some of the other Inquisitors I bet, Oppo Rancisis- the ugly-looking tree guy from Phantom Menace, he was, Luke. And Ka-Moon Kholi, Selrahc Elous, some guy named "Naq Med" if reading this right I am,

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trees are very 🥺 because sometimes i’ll stand under the shade of a tree and look up at it and it’ll sway its branches about in the wind and i’m like oh my God i’m alive and YOU’RE alive. we are alive together and made up of the same starry stuff and standing right next to each other in this moment on this earth. do u feel it when i reach out and press my hand to your trunk? can you hear me? i think you’re so neat. and then the sunlight filters through its leaves just so and that lovely green color leaves me dazzled. it’s just very nice to be an alive thing next to a different sort of alive thing

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boyfriend was just getting all gushy because I did something nice for him and he said "I love you so much, you are the most wonderful creature," and then in an abruptly solemn tone added "but make no mistake. you are a creature"

[chicken-druid]

i really think we could maybe benefit as a society from having clearer ideas about what words like "predator" and "pedophile" mean. other day i saw a reddit thread where someone was expressing concern about a 17-year-old boy in their family dating a 13-year-old girl, which i'm not saying sounds like a safe and healthy relationship to me (important to note: the post gave no indications whatsoever that the relationship was sexual in any way), but the thread was full of people demonizing the 17-year-old as though the post had said he was 33. someone said he would legally be a pedophile once he turned 18 and someone else advised op to call the police now so they can be ready to arrest him at midnight on his 18th birthday. one of the more reasoned voices was like "it would be one thing if they were 18 and 22, but..." to which another person replied "no it wouldn't, an 18 year old is practically still a child" and did not see the irony. another person trying to be more reasonable pointed out that we don't KNOW this kid is a predator, after all his parents signed off on this, maybe he genuinely hasn't been taught better than this, to which another person replied "it doesn't matter whether he knows better, he's a predator either way".

can we maybe all get together, have a conference on it or something, and agree that 1) you can't accidentally or unknowingly be a sexual predator; that word loses all meaning if it doesn't refer to a deliberate, malicious pattern of behavior to take sexual advantage of vulnerable people, and 2) a pubescent or postpubescent minor who experiences attraction to other pubescent or postpubescent minors is not a pedophile, nor do they magically become a pedophile if that attraction doesn't instantly cease on their 18th birthday. would that be cool. because i think the way most people talk about these issues right now is absolutely insane and does more harm than good.

(in an ideal world i would also have us reserve the word pedophile for people who are actually exclusively sexually attracted to prepubescent children, because i think that's a meaningfully separate phenomenon that is worth distinguishing from opportunistic predators who are primarily attracted to adults but prey on teenagers because they're easier to manipulate, but i don't say that take very loudly because i suspect far too few people are capable of that level of nuance on a subject this volatile)

[chicken-druid]

My fave part of this tweet is that even though a lot of people are assuming this was an AI thing or whatever

this is the actual lede of their review of the Super Mario movie

"But it is also, if I check the clock, Mario Time". Poetry

[chicken-druid]

Quack quack