complicatedsimplicity

[complicatedsimplicity]

as a person who uses either public bathroom on a toss of a coin i gottta say its kind of ridicuous that people are so attached to them being seperate facilities. youre not usually gonna see anyones dick at the urinal and youre not usually gonna be able to spy on any women. the stalls are the same except one has a little tampon bin. we would lose nothing if all bathrooms were unisex and i'll die on that hill.

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i tried to make a venn diagram but my migraine is ironically too bad for me to have the brain power to take the time to fix the proportions and then i locked one of the text layers and got pissed off and gave up. but i kind of like it all fucked up like this

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sorry if i'm gonna be quiet for a while. my country recently introduced laws that make it so that in order to use social media to the fullest (not being able to view ns/fw content and in a few cases, not even having access to dms), i HAVE to give the sites my id/face scan.

it goes into effect july 25th. it'll probably effect here too, since this place allows mature content (tho not full on ns/fw)

i'm very distressed about it bc i might end up not even being able to talk to my internet friends. i don't really have any irl ones

if i have to disappear on most socials by then, you know why.

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When I was a teenager and I struggled to be liked, I was regularly told, "Just be yourself."

At the time, I couldn't figure out why that advice wasn't helpful. But now that I'm in my 30s, I'm just starting to learn what being myself even means, and it's not even close to what was expected of me as a teenager. "Just be yourself" didn't make sense to me because I was never allowed to be myself.

I was expected to submit to authority despite hierarchies being absolute bullshit to me. I was expected to write apology letters to my teachers whenever I got in trouble even though I wasn't sorry at all. I was expected to not only obey them and stay off their radar, but to go out of my way to get on their good side.

I was expected to converse on command. Wanting to be left alone was considered rude.

I was told to "talk to people" despite not knowing what to say and despite my social battery being drained at the time.

I was expected to never talk about my special interest (math) because other people don't like it. I was also expected to talk about it on command whenever someone needed my help (even though I do math in unique ways that most people wouldn't understand, and even though my math skills didn't come with an ability to explain it). I was also labeled as "smart" and expected to be smart in all subjects just because I'm good at math.

I was told to not care if people dislike me. I was also told to stop doing things that would cause people to think I'm weird and dislike me.

I was expected to hold onto thoughts on command, despite that being impossible because countless thoughts run through my head all the time.

I was expected to constantly control every tone, facial expression, and word I said in order to prevent people from making assumptions.

I was often told "just be yourself" when I was going out of my way to guess at how to get attention. But being openly weird and being noticed for it very much IS being myself. I just didn't know how to do it the correct way at the time.

There were times when I went out of my way to shrink myself and be a people pleaser hoping to be liked or to avoid being punished. This was labeled as "nice" and it became an expectation. People saw that "nice" version of me as "being myself". When I felt like being nice didn't work and I decided to try being an asshole, I was told to "be myself", even though the "myself" they wanted me to be wasn't myself at all.

The people who told me to be myself are the people who prohibited me the most from being myself. It now makes perfect sense why "just be yourself" was bullshit.

But there is still some truth to the advice to be yourself. You'll occasionally have to deviate from being yourself. You may have to make yourself invisible to bullies in order to protect yourself (such as an LGBT person being in the closet, or an autistic person masking). You may have to take guesses at how to get noticed. If you're invited to an activity that isn't your cup of tea, you may have to give it a try in order to prevent isolating yourself. If someone is kind of an asshole but tolerable, you may have to be nice to them in order to keep open the opportunity of meeting a nicer person through them. But you have to ask yourself whether deviating from being yourself is actually helpful in that scenario. Would the bullies actually leave you alone, or would they still bully you anyway? Would you be able to change yourself long enough for it to work, or would you just get burned out and still fail?

Most importantly, if you have a decent choice between being yourself and being someone you're not, be yourself. If you have a choice between complete loneliness or someone you have to change for, you may have to change temporarily. But if you have a choice between people who accept you and people who you have to change for, choose the people who accept you. When you're first trying to connect with people, you'll often have to sacrifice parts of yourself in order to be more adaptable and increase the number of social interactions you have. Or you may have to try new things in order to figure out what being yourself even means. But after you've interacted with enough people, you should pay attention to which connections required the least effort to deviate from yourself, and prioritize those connections.

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[complicatedsimplicity]

Happy Indigenous Peoples Day

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[complicatedsimplicity]

From the article:

Above the whirring of 300,000 cars each day on Los Angeles’s 101 freeway, an ambitious project is taking shape. The Wallis Annenberg wildlife crossing is the largest wildlife bridge in the world at 210ft long and 174ft wide, and this week it’s had help taking shape: soil. “This is the soul of the project,” says Beth Pratt, the regional executive director, California, at the National Wildlife Federation, who has worked on making the crossing become a reality over the last 13 years. She says she’s seen many milestones, like the 26m pounds of concrete poured to create the structure, but this one is special. “To be able to put my hand in that soil and toss it on and know that we’ll be putting milkweed plants that will flourish for monarch butterflies, or picturing the first mountain lion paw print on that soil,” she says, fills her with hope. “It is wonderful to watch this habitat take shape.” The plot is a native wildlife habitat that connects two parts of the Santa Monica mountain range, with the hopes of saving creatures – from the famous local mountain lions, down to frogs and insects – from being crushed by cars on one of the nation’s busiest roadways. With nearly an acre of local plants on either side and thick vegetated sound walls 12ft high to dampen light and noise for nocturnal animals as they slip across, it’s an unprecedented feat of engineering. Imagination, too. The project began in 2022 through a public-private partnership that brought together many organizations to cover the $92m in costs, according to Caltrans, the state transportation department. Research shows that wildlife crossings save money because it limits animal interactions with vehicles.

[complicatedsimplicity]

Jurassic World movies: "No one cares about dinosaurs anymore!"

People IRL when they see a toad:

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I’ve been seeing quite a few phony “wildlife rescue” videos recently, so I just want to put out this quick PSA:

- don’t “save” wild prey animals from predators. just don’t. even if the prey animal is cute. even if the predator is scary or gross.

- if you find a baby deer all on its own, it’s doing fine. deer naturally leave their fawns alone for extended periods of time. leave it alone. mama will come back, and she can take care of baby much better than you can.

- if, however, you find a fawn with heavy, visible open wounds, or if mom has a carcass nearby, then you can call a qualified wildlife rehab center. do NOT bring it into your house and try to raise it yourself

- don’t try and raise ANY wild animals yourself, actually. The only exception I would give would be like, jumping spiders or earthworms

- don’t touch wild animals. not even if they come up to you. not even babies. ESPECIALLY not babies.

- don’t feed wild animals. this can cause them to expect food from humans, which can be disastrous if they don’t get it

In general, just observe wild animals from a respectful distance. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.

[complicatedsimplicity]

I can’t make pasta any more without mumbling to myself, “wet the drys… then dry the wets…”

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[complicatedsimplicity]

when i first heard about the male loneliness epidemic i was like oh yeah close camaraderie and bonding between men is often discouraged in favor of competition or, if not discouraged, at least filtered through a lens of individualism that precludes deep connections. and then i learned what people meant by it (men arent getting laid) to which i say skill issue

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Trying to explain even one ounce of class/caste/ethnic/religious dynamics in South Asia to somebody completely removed from it is so humbling like sometimes I forget how cartoonishly insane all of it is. The racism factory that churns out new types of racisms

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donald trump will die on july 20th 2025 at 1pm pacific standard time

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a secret they dont tell you is that you dont need to have a set time and place for exercise. sure going to the gym is gonna give you a more dedicated workout but like if you're physically able to you can just jog on the spot while your food is cooking. brushing your teeth? do a couple of squats. sometimes i drop to the floor and plank until my arms hurt and then go on with my day. if you live a sedentary lifestyle its better than nothing.

[complicatedsimplicity]

I'm a very big fan of the “one of the ways Batman fights crime is by making the bad guys afraid he could be anywhere”. The “he’s not in every shadow, but he could be in any shadow” thing.

I think it would be fun to mix that with the way the rest of the batfam is drawn when they're in shadows:

the glowy eyes and splashes of vibrant colour, especially with Nightwing's symbol looking like it's actually reflective.

So now I'm thinking:

imagine if Gothamites realized that dangerous people get really uneasy when they keep seeing things that, out of the corner of their eye, might look like a vigilante. To the point that they avoid areas where, let's say, an old poster on the wall is just that shade of yellow that keeps jumpscaring them every time they turn. Or that old trash can that still has a patch of green paint that hasn't peeled away yet. Not even realizing what makes them nervous, just knowing that a particular place makes them jumpy. Stuff like that.

So to keep themselves a little safer Gothamites just start… adding little things like that in their neighborhoods. Nothing that outright references the Bats - stuff like that might get vandalised or just lose the effect if it's recognised, but things like:

- plants on window sills in flower pots or vases in bright colors

- little shiny trinkets in the windows that just might be mistaken for a flash of a utility belt

- colorful curtains get very popular for children's bedrooms

- someone sticking a piece of blue reflective vinyl on a chimney visible from the street, so that as you walk you see a little flash of electric blue when the light from streetlights hits it just right

- people painting a pair of dots with glow-in-the-dark white paint high up on walls by fire escapes or in dark alleys, that look like glowing eyes

So basically I want Gothamites to invent protective charms and amulets which have exactly zero supernatural properties and aren’t intended to have any, but still very much work lmao