#be in awe

[headinthecloudsgal]

one of the secrets in life is to look at the world as if you were a kid. walk on the side of the road, one foot after the other, arms extended as if flying. touch the flowers, the grass, the dirt. stop to collect a rock, to take off your shoes and run down the hill barefoot. have a little dance, sing along, say hi to the cows, save a ladybug that’s trapped on its back. be in awe.

[ahotknife]

the thing is that childhood doesn't just end when you turn 18 or when you turn 21. it's going to end dozens of times over. your childhood pet will die. actors you loved in movies you watched as a kid will die. your grandparents will die, and then your parents will die. it's going to end dozens and dozens of times and all you can do is let it. all you can do is stand in the middle of the grocery store and stare at freezers full of microwave pizza because you've suddenly been seized by the memory of what it felt like to have a pizza party on the last day of school before summer break. which is another ending in and of itself

[redrook]

I spent a lot of time handcuffed and in a cage in high school, for a charity bit the grocery store I worked at would do

the bit was that I was "put in jail for having too big a heart" and customers could donate to my bail to get me out (and the money would go to a children's hospital or something)

now. I was very clearly a teenaged employee handcuffed inside a large cage. and I would honestly tell people that I had been in there for hours. and people would say, that's terrible! that's awful! and I would show them my wrists red from the tight handcuffs, and say but I'm sooooooo close to making bail.

and then they would dump some cash in the basket, I'd thank them, and they'd walk away.

and every so often, one of the managers would come by and collect some of the cash, so I could keep being soooooo close to making bail.

I was very good with this bit. Parents with small kids would pay $5-10 if I told their children I had been placed in jail for not cleaning my room/doing my homework, etc. For people in their 20s, I'd threaten that I was very bad at playing the harmonica, but I WOULD play it and we'd all suffer unless they paid me. and for the most amount of money, older men in suits would almost always pay $20s if I avoided eye contact and stammered a lot.

eventually, the managers started to feel bad because I was in the cage so fucking long and often, that I'd need someone to brace me when I got out because I'd have no feeling in my legs. wobbling like a newborn giraffe.

but I would also rake in at LEAST $100 an hour in charity.

so they were like, hey champ. can we, uh, give you a pillow to sit on. in the cage. would you like a pillow so you're not just sitting on a cold metal slab. can we give you a pillow.

and I had to explain to them that if they gave me a pillow, people would think I was more comfortable, so they wouldn't feel as bad, so I'd bring in less money.

the compromise was that they'd bring me a nice coffee every couple hours, which I would have to try to block with my body from the customers.

all this money went to charity. that's what the money was for. it's what was on the sign. but how much they were willing to pay was very contingent on how comfortable I looked, never mind the fact that I was still a teenaged employee handcuffed inside a cage.

and out of the dozens of shifts I did this on, not ONCE did ANYONE say, hey kid I'm going to go talk to your manager because what the fuck is going on here. they would just drop money in the basket, and I'd thank them and sip from my secret drink.

I actually had people get MAD at me that I told them I was far away from bail, they donated like $15, and then 20 minutes I got let out because my shift ended.

again. the money was for charity. it was on the sign that was very clearly placed on the upper half of my cage.

so yeah. even when people think they mean well. people can be really, really fucking stupid.

[goldensunset]

if someone is talking about how much they love their parents do not jump in and start venting about your issues with your parents. if someone is venting about their issues with their parents do not jump in and start talking about how much you love your parents. peace and love amen swag city

[feralcringeman]

PROOF IN CASE YOU NEED IT

UPDATE:

I put this in my reblogs but I’m going to attack this to the main post.

TRUMP HIMSELF DIDN’T CHEAT BUT SOMEONE DEFINITELY TAMPERED WITH THE ELECTION RESULTS.

^

Made by the amazing @the-gay-prometheus (genuinely thank you for saying this)

[beaft]

do genuinely find it fascinating how indeed.com is like the biggest job-hunting website out there and yet manages to be profoundly useless in every possible way

[creepymutelilbugger]

op turned reblogs off but this post must live. it must live and spread malignantly .

[shinesurge]

Honestly I can tell you finding out art was made by AI really does immediately, legitimately sour it for me, like people will trot this out as a Gotcha for anti-AI people but it's just making it clear they don't consider art to be the conversation that it is lol. It's similar to the way Harry Potter immediately soured for me because engaging with it while knowing the kind of heart Rowling is writing from changes the way the work feels; there isn't any moralizing or whatever that I have to do, it's easy to drop it because it's rotted in my hands.

"Oh but you LIKED this song before, nothing changed!" The conversational partner did. A very large portion of what is interesting to me about art is thinking of why the creator chose that instrumentation, or what made them want to make the thing in the first place. Finding out I've been talking to a wall completely removes an entire third of the force that art is to me, and I can't argue that anything about art or its consumption is Objectively Correct but I can argue it's fucking boring lmao

[druid-for-hire]

There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.

[sreegs]

remembering when the something awful forums made a word filter that changed the word "females" so it was surrounded by Ferengi emoji (we called em 'smilies' not emoji back in the day) so it looked like this:

because someone was sick of incels using the word to refer to women

[welcome2h]

Now that it's getting warmer outside again, I just want something like this 🌻☀️

[linkcharacter]

Hanging out

[cottagedreamy]

God told me to draw this

[chloesimaginationthings]

Harley Sawyer is a very normal man from Poppy playtime

[redstonedust]

ngl for lot of my life i thought parents sitting their kids down and telling them how babies are made was just a thing they made up for comedies on tv so now im curious how common it actually is.