#don't lock the door

[synapsenstau]

[inkskinned]

crows use tools and like to slide down snowy hills. today we saw a goose with a hurt foot who was kept safe by his flock - before taking off, they waited for him to catch up. there are colors only butterflies see. reindeer are matriarchical. cows have best friends and 4 stomachs and like jazz music. i watched a video recently of an octopus making himself a door out of a coconut shell.

i am a little soft, okay. but sometimes i can't talk either. the world is like fractal light to me, and passes through my skin in tendrils. i feel certain small things like a catapult; i skirt around the big things and somehow arrive in crisis without ever realizing i'm in pain.

in 5th grade we read The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time, which is about a young autistic boy. it is how they introduced us to empathy about neurotypes, which was well-timed: around 10 years old was when i started having my life fully ruined by symptoms. people started noticing.

i wonder if birds can tell if another bird is odd. like the phrase odd duck. i have to believe that all odd ducks are still very much loved by the other normal ducks. i have to believe that, or i will cry.

i remember my 5th grade teacher holding the curious incident up, dazzled by the language written by someone who is neurotypical. my teacher said: "sometimes i want to cut open their mind to know exactly how autistics are thinking. it's just so different! they must see the world so strangely!" later, at 22, in my education classes, we were taught to say a person with autism or a person on the spectrum or neurodivergent. i actually personally kind of like person-first language - it implies the other person is trying to protect me from myself. i know they had to teach themselves that pattern of speech, is all, and it shows they're at least trying. and i was a person first, even if i wasn't good at it.

plants learn information. they must encode data somehow, but where would they store it? when you cut open a sapling, you cannot find the how they think - if they "think" at all. they learn, but do not think. i want to paint that process - i think it would be mostly purple and blue.

the book was not about me, it was about a young boy. his life was patterned into a different set of categories. he did not cry about the tag on his shirt. i remember reading it and saying to myself: i am wrong, and broken, but it isn't in this way. something else is wrong with me instead. later, in that same person-first education class, my teacher would bring up the curious incident and mention that it is now widely panned as being inaccurate and stereotypical. she frowned and said we might not know how a person with autism thinks, but it is unlikely to be expressed in that way. this book was written with the best intentions by a special-ed teacher, but there's some debate as to if somebody who was on the spectrum would be even able to write something like this.

we might not understand it, but crows and ravens have developed their own language. this is also true of whales, dolphins, and many other species. i do not know how a crow thinks, but we do know they can problem solve. (is "thinking" equal to "problem solving"? or is "thinking" data processing? data management?) i do not know how my dog thinks, either, but we "talk" all the same - i know what he is asking for, even if he only asks once.

i am not a dolphin or reindeer or a dog in the nighttime, but i am an odd duck. in the ugly duckling, she grows up and comes home and is beautiful and finds her soulmate. all that ugliness she experienced lives in downy feathers inside of her, staining everything a muted grey. she is beautiful eventually, though, so she is loved. they do not want to cut her open to see how she thinks.

a while ago i got into an argument with a classmate about that weird sia music video about autism. my classmate said she thought it was good to raise awareness. i told her they should have just hired someone else to do it. she said it's not fair to an autistic person to expect them to be able to handle that kind of a thing.

today i saw a goose, and he was limping. i want to be loved like a flock loves a wounded creature: the phrase taken under a wing. which is to say i have always known i am not normal. desperate, mewling - i want to be loved beyond words.

loved beyond thinking.

[helsensm]

farm boys Valentine's Days 💗

+ close up on the last one

[lady-harrowhark]

do you suppose john asked kiriona if she and ianthe were being safe too? or is that concern reserved for harrow?

[imagine-darksiders]

Dads will literally lock their daughters in the garage and when you climb out a window and confront them, they're sitting in their chair watching TV like 'what happened to you?' lmao

To be clear, he did not do this maliciously. We were in the garage working out and he finished on the bike before me, and just left, and... locked the door from the garage into the house behind him. I'm wailing on the door like an animal and get no response so I haul my juicy ass through a window and find him in the house watching Antiques Roadshow like nothing has happened.

Dads.

[wearerandomlyyours]

Baby Bradley: *opens bedroom door* Uncle Mav? Uncle Ice? ....What are you doing?

Ice: ......

Mav: ......

Bradley: ......

Mav: We're playing Twister.

Bradley: Oh.

*Thirty years later*

Rooster: ....they weren't playing Twister.

[csphire]

Anna broke into Dammon's House so you don't have to.

My gods, the poor fella has no kitchen!

I guess he eats out.

*No Dammon was harmed in this process. He's just eepy. I cast Feign Death on him and since something was going hinky with the lock I just eldritch blasted the door down. Also didn't save.

[beedreamscape]

The only thing missing for John to become the perfect antagonist is owning a cat that everyone hates and that hates everyone.

The cat follows him around and sits on his lap while he shares tea and biscuits with people. Cohort soldier got the habit of saluting/bowing to the cat out of playfulness. Sometimes it just loafs on high corners of rooms and judges whoever's in it.

Every lyctor fears the thing is psychic somehow or conscious or a human soul trapped in a cat. Maybe even Alecto's soul trapped in a cat!

But no, just a grumpy cat that hates everyone but John.

And Harrow. Harrow is enough of a black cat in spirit for the cat to like her too.

The cat has the warmest golden eyes and makes her puke to look directly at it.

And over the myriads everyone at some point tried to kill it, but John being who he is has been keeping this cat alive for the past 10k+ years.

(Out of pettiness, Pyrrha took the cat away with her in the end of htn and gave it to Nona.)

[barksbog]

gumby worm wants to be free so badly

[illmoraineakoi]

What if the Pale King locked himself away in the Dream Realm to recreate what he did to the Hollow Knight? After the Vessel leaked and he realized that it most likely had capability enough to suffer, but far far too late to even hope to do anything to fix it. He was beyond the point of no return, there was nothing he could do to undo the Sealing. And even if he could, there were no other options that he could think of of what to do about the Blazing Light.

He had no choice but to keep the Vessel sealed. No choice but to watch his kingdom crumble. There was nothing he could do.

Nothing, but to seal himself away in a self-imposed punishment in the exact same way he imparted onto his only (known) living child.

A weak attempt to impose the same agony onto himself as he forced onto them.

And should the people of his kingdom stop worshiping him and forget he exists, dwindling his power and life to a pathetic end?

Well...

Perhaps that might've been for the best.

[random-human-being2311]

the upside about me being aroace is that you never have to deal with me simping on main and hopelessly being attracted to anyone from a fandom and making it everyone else's problem.

Sadly, you instead have to deal with me being all-consumed by songs and hopelessly obsessing over them on main instead.

[sleep-nurse]

this is the ''hospital'' i had to go in for my appointment straight up horror movie material there was literally no soul

[volivolition]

perceppy doodles, with my usual headcanons of "whatever harry's seeing showing up in the mist" and "whenever harry's not using a sense, it shows up on perception." suddenly trapped in a dark room? pop! you have eyes again! and then some froggy hat coffee tasting :3 i love my senses <3

[zrrion]

"There are horrible war things in this world" He continued, stepping down yet another step, "That, through their ability to put absolute power within mortal reach, cannot be allowed to exist yet are powerful enough that destruction is not possible. We've tried to destroy some of them and only succeeded once, though that was largely by accident. Gods what a mess that was!"

After about 15 minutes of descending, and 15 minutes of mostly ignored rambling, the 2 of them finally got to the bottom of the stairs and found themselves in a small room. On the wall to their left was a grandfather clock fashioned from black stone, to their right was a small potted plum tree, and directly in front of them was a large reddish marble door.

"I want you to clear your mind and close your eyes. Picture for me a white circle. Can you see it?"

"Aye, I see it."

"good, now I want you to imagine that circle in the middle of a wheat field. The breeze is blowing through the trees and the wheat is rippling almost like the ocean. Imagine the colour of the wheat swaying in the wind."

"Now still keep that circle in your mind but concentrate on the insects flying in the field, the sound of the birds. There is something in the circle now. You do not look at the thing in the circle, it is in your peripheral vision only. You do not recognize the thing in the circle. There is a deer walking slowly alongside the treeline in the distance. You can only just make it out silhouetted against the sky as it slowly walks over the top of a hill and out of sight."

"I don't like this anymore."

"The birds have stopped singing."

"I want to open my eyes."

"You do not look at the circle, it is in your peripheral vision only. You reach into the circle. You grasp the thing inside it. You do not recognize the thing in your hands. You are not looking at the thing in your hands. You do not see its eyes."

"You pull it out of the circle and into the field."

"Please!"

"The wheat is a beautiful gold, sparkling almost in the evening sunlight. Do you see it?"

"Yes."

"Good. Keep your hand gripped tight and open your eyes."

As the two of them opened their eyes the door began to slowly swing open with an eerie silence. The junior of the 2 had blood running from where their nails had dug into their palm. The grandfather clock still wasn't moving. Neither of them commented on that as they walked through the door and into the main chamber of the facility. The man behind the front desk was busy pouring over a large book and did not acknowledge them as they walked past.

"And that is the key to the front door. You will need to do that every time you come down here for your shift. Your locker also has a lock. If you want you can come up with a key for it but I just leave mine unlocked. If a thief gets this deep in the facility they aren't gonna steal your spare set of gloves or whatever you keep in there. Once you've got your locker situation figured out talk to Alger at the front desk, you'll be working with him today."

[loveandleases]

MC WALKING IN ON CAM?? *faints* cannot wait, foaming at the mouth

Several people in my inbox want it! I shall serve! I'm already embarrassed just thinking about writing it but it's going to be fun.

[lunar-wandering]

finding out that where i live is actually part of the appalachian mountains has ruined my anxious ass for life btw it's part of why i had such a hard time sleeping while at my cottage like a week ago, i remembered that Fact and realized that i was alone. in a cabin. in the woods. in a place that's part of the appalachian mountains. and proceeded to have a totally normal reaction to that at midnight o clock-