#Trial of Skill

[geosabor]

Dominion of Hate Page 38

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[savageday6]

DAY6 FOR COSMOPOLITAN KOREA

[itsalwaysforyou]

this is how i imagine jay just gets around

[thepoisonroom]

that post that's like "learning social skills helps with social anxiety" applies to dating also btw

[fontainesibs]

Lyney: If you get in trouble, I can be like... a lawyer to you now. Ok?

Freminet : Okay.

*later*

Lynette: Freminet, Sit down on the chair, you're in trouble.

Lyney, whispering: Deny everything.

Freminet : That isn't a chair.

[mattodore]

spinning them around

[beansthathavebeenbaked]

every like few days ill remember that fantasy life sequel is real and not something i made up to pretend everything is ok and thtat It Approaches and then im like oh my god. i have to prepare for the reckoning (guy's favorite game ever gets a sequel goes into hiding for 5 years straight)

[afterxcare]

Come. My shark is hungry.

[furies-inthe-mirror]

dont you tell me how i feel.

[literallyjusttoa]

Revisiting the Tails of Apollo AU but this time it's polldona. I'm sure this is the content all of the Tails of Apollo fans want from me!

AoD is an Eastern Emerald Elysia Sea Slug bc they are pretty.

[geosabor]

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[raqueliie]

BURNING MAZE SPOILERS

happy birthday to Jason grace

[abirddogmoment]

some thoughts about the pressures of trialing in dog sports and the emotional environment of trials, partially inspired by this post by the beautiful @mongrelization

this post happened to come at a time when I was at a decision point in my trial career with mav. he had just started refusing jumps (i thought it was a training issue at the time, i now know he was in pain) and he wasn't having fun. we were disconnected in the ring, with him choosing to go visit friends or just blow past obstacles without attempting them. it was frustrating and it was such a stark contrast from our training runs (not flawless but immeasurably better than our performances in the ring) and i was making jokes (as everyone does!) about mav being the worst, etc, etc.

except they weren't jokes.

they sounded like jokes and they even felt like jokes in the moment, but looking back i can confidently see that i was frustrated and resentful and the "lighthearted jokes" from other competitors and from myself were just fueling the fire. i saw darcies post shortly after a particularly frustrating trial where we just couldn't connect, i was trying to decide whether to push through and fix our issues or give up completely on agility.

her post wasn't an epiphany, i probably would've gotten there eventually, but her post that said, essentially hey its fucked up to make those jokes about your dog and its fucked up for people to make those jokes about your dog and thats not how a trial should be - something clicked. its NOT how it should be.

i took a break from trialing in everything and cut training way back and just took all the pressure off of mav while i got my internal emotional environment back on track. im a really competitive person and its hard to consciously dial that back, but more than that, it's legitimately embarrassing when things go wrong with people watching you. if your default is humor about it (like mine), its a hard shift to not make jokes about your dog when things go wrong. but its an important and necessary shift.

i started trialing him again after about 3 months off, very lightly. i stopped entering full weekends and opted to do half-days or only saturdays and he fucking THRIVED. i made time to meet all his needs before trials, i prioritized his happiness over technically correct courses, and i got over the embarrassment of excusing myself from a run if it was going downhill. i fixed my internal emotional environment and that fixed our disconnect and made every win more meaningful.

the thing is, i am 100% sure i would not have fixed my emotional environment if i was actively competing and practicing the same patterns. i absolutely had to take that step back to fix myself. you can't make meaningful change if youre still in the middle of it acting it out.

i lost out on trials with mav and that sucked so much in the moment. i had awful FOMO watching my friends compete and finish titles while we did little low-pressure walks at home. but ultimately i gained something so much more important, and looking back i can't bring myself to regret that at all.

[theadventurek9]

Guess how an obedience ring set up with no game plan went?

Terrible. I'm mad at myself and overall wasted a very good opportunity to set up good training scenarios.

I was frazzled. I could find the group of people in the park when I got there and by the time I found them they were getting ready to tear down the utility ring and put up open, so I felt rushed.

I was frustrated and did a bunch of training that probably did more harm than good. I got frustrated and told her no several times which is never part of my training plan.

Utility feels like it's killing me. I have not been able to train to a consistency that is reliable for trials and I feel guilty about it. I have so much to fix.

The only exercise I don't worry about now is the stand for exam.

I really need to fix myself and help her have more clarity. I got told my footwork for halts is very inconsistent. Which is probably why she doesn't want to sit for me.

I haven't been training consistently with any of the animals, I have no drive. Ryker has been pissing me off everytime I try and do anything with him, and he isn't even being hard to deal with. He is just being a young dog.

[devils-little-sista]

Will talking about his ex boyfriend Nico: He’s weird 😐😒🤢🤨😤😠😡🤬🙄🤮

Apollo talking about his current boyfriend Nico: He’s weird 😳😍🥰😘😚😜😏😩🥺🥵🤫🫠🫣🤭🤤😮‍💨😈

[meirimerens]

got the tldr of the vid that I'm Not Watching All That & somewhat amusing how the straw breaking the camel's back for people over James Somerton is his blatant and unashamed plagiarism (as it should be genuinely i don't think you can nor should recover from this) like he hasn't regurgitated for years vile, unempathetic, ahistorical and Purely Just Wrong information about gay history including about the fight for legal same-sex marriage in the US and the AIDS crisis. like an alarming amount of people truly heard his ass say "all the good fun funky artistic and radical gays died of aids and all those who were left were unfun stuck-up prudes and conservatives also the fight for legal same-sex marriage was an assimilationist ploy by the latter who just wanted big gay weddings" as if the gay men who survived the epidemic didn't literally lose lovers and friends and entire communities and long-term partners who they shared a life with and who were denied any crumb of this previous life at their death because there was no legal recognition for same-sex cohabitation and unions and their homophobic family could tear everything from the surviving partner thanks to this lack of recognition and let it slide.

some people out there were truly so eager to shit on the boring assimilationist prude gays who survived aids by being stuck-up prudes and who just wanted "big gay weddings" they made up in their minds to get mad at that they turned their brains off and let it slide. they could've used their smoothed-out brains for ONE minute & found out that surviving took 1) plain boring luck and 2) radical, loud, proud gay activists campaigning for safe/safer sex and the information campaigns they led, as well as the protests and demonstrations they undertook to make the government fucking care for once. and that legally-recognized unions [be they civil or religious] were a matter of survival for the partner left behind. some people out there truly let a business major with a turtleneck (possibly the definition of boring) passing himself off as cool and radical and an intellectual tell them homophobic bullshit. and did not blink. like OF COURSE this guy's gonna be a plagiarist. he needs to get his information from SOMEWHERE. because when he tries to formulate his own stuff it's complete fabrications or the frankensteining of multiple sources that he manages to misunderstand/misrepresent threefold over. trying to fit a knit sock over the foot with the inside out and wonder why that itches.

i know many people in his audience are likely very young and also likely american and as such did most of their growing up in a world where their country (1 out of 195. give or take.) had legalized gay marriage but i cannot even begin to describe 1) how Young legalized gay wedding is, even in ""the west"" and 2) how many. other countries there are. my country legalized same-sex marriage before the US did. i am not even 25 and i still remember the hordes of catholics marching down the streets chanting homophobic slogans, implying the only reason two mommies or two daddies would want to raise a child together is for nefarious, vile purposes. i still remember families having to drag their asses into court to argue that, yes, a woman who raised a child for its whole life with another woman she's in a long-term committed cohabitated relationship with should have the right to be considered a direct guardian even if she's not biologically related to the child, and spending thousands of bucks having to argue their case in court. this might be shocking to some, but there are countries where homosexuality is punishable by death. in others, not by death, but by imprisonment. in others, not by imprisonment, but by ""medical intervention"". in others, not by ""medical intervention" but by fines. and in some others still, you can be gay (yay!) but you still cannot get married or civil-unioned, and the very same shit that was discussed in the 80s is still discussed now. the right to stay a guardian of your partner's child if your partner dies or is ill, so the kid does not go into foster care. the right to inherit your partner's property according to married rights instead of having through long annoying time- and money-consuming legal processes. the right to arrange your partner's funeral or have a say in their medical choices if they're incapacitated instead of their (potentially homophobic) families.

like We Are Not There Yet. we are not in a world where any homosexual can truly, fully, wholeheartedly assimilate, whether you consider it a good thing or not. fun gay artists and boring uninteresting gay office workers die the same death that we all do. the one you don't wake from. and guess what. all types of homosexuals, regardless of which ones you pick and choose to be mad at, are affected by homophobic legislation. not just the ones you think should be spared because they're oh so fun. and oh so radical.

donate to the rainbow railroad org if you can. they help LGBT+ people escape state-sponsored violence. a singular nail on one of their members' hand does more activism and real-life good than any mfer making video essays could do in his entire life.