#fractalsays

[geometricfractal]

It occurred to me just after I posted my last poll that polls serve a very interesting second purpose, on top of causing fights over food choices and determining the best blorbo. The little "67 votes" marker is perhaps the most accurate look at how many people have seen any given post, and it is always far bigger than the number of notes! A poll with two reblogs might have fifty votes! There's so many people on this website, it's amazing!

So I want to try something. An experiment, if you will, to see how many people actually see a given post. For science. And for the little gremlin in me who likes experiments and numbers and statistics and wants new experiments and numbers and statistics to play with.

[geometricfractal]

So I have recently changed my preferred nighttime lighting in my room, and I got curious: what do other people do for best sleep?

[geometricfractal]

The boop button is gone...I witnessed it go. One minute I was booping, the next I could not.

Even the notifications of past boops have vanished, evaporated. It is as if that beautiful button never even existed. The site has forgotten.

But not us, never us. We remember the boop.

[geometricfractal]

The thing you’re never told about being an adult is just how often you have to tell yourself no to getting ice cream. Each day, my brain says “we could walk in there and get ice cream”, and on at least half of the days I, personally, a being of great desire for ice cream, has to tell it no. Outrageous.

[geometricfractal]

So I've been going down nostalgia lane recently with old flash games (orisinal!) and it got me thinking about ways in which memories are pulled up by different senses. So on that note:

Obviously the examples don't cover everything, just go with what feels the most right :)

[geometricfractal]

I helped at a cookie decorating table for kids today. It was a Halloween party. There were pumpkin-shaped cookies. And the whole time, I couldn't stop thinking about that poem I've seen, the one about the little boy who would draw the wildest things, and then he went to school and he was taught to draw the red flower with the green stem. Remember that poem? Yeah.

The adults were obsessed with how these kids were decorating their pumpkin cookies. Constant questions. "You want me to get you the green icing for the stem?" "Oh, don't you want to give it a green stem?" "Here, let me give you a hand with that." Parents looking at their child's orange pumpkin with a green stem and saying "oh, I like the stem!"

No one complimented the ones that were different, the ones that were brown and orange and green frosting mashed together, with sprinkles scattered haphazardly on top. They weren't rude about them, no. But there was very little praise for the artistry of those chaotic cookies. An "oh, look at that, you made an icing pile, you want to eat it?" perhaps. An encouraging voice. But no compliments.

I made a cookie for myself at one point. A brown pumpkin, with an orange stem. I wanted the brown icing, it was chocolate. And the stem...at that point I had heard too many people pushing for the green stem. Maybe I had to prove to myself that I still had my creativity. Maybe I was trying to prove to the kids that they could do it too. They could paint outside the lines. Their cookie didn't have to look like all the others.

Their flower didn't have to be red with a green stem.

[geometricfractal]

All right y'all it's time for an opinion on temperatures again, because I swear these are different and I need validation

[geometricfractal]

It is tempting to believe that mosquitos are merely another flying insect, doing their own thing with no regard to how it affects humans.

I present a new theory: mosquitos are actually highly intelligent beings who have discovered the exact distance one must fly from a human head to cause said human to slap themselves repeatedly about the face and head without actually doing any harm to the mosquito. I further present that this is a form of entertainment in the mosquito kingdom, with points given for number and intensity of slaps.

I rest my case.

[geometricfractal]

Had another “are you sick? Why are you wearing a mask?” question today and realized that it feels really weird and isolating to live in a society where the answer to that that people will actually understand is “I don’t like getting sick”, rather than “I was barely able to move even around my house for a month the one time I’ve had Covid and I am afraid that a second time would permanently damage my functioning even further than it already is”.

They’re both true, it’s just somewhat different levels of severity, y’know?

[geometricfractal]

Feel free to tell me more details in the tags, polls are not actually as good a medium for this as I thought, but at this point I am Committed :D

[geometricfractal]

So, I've been having an ongoing disagreement with several people in my life about whether it is better to be too cold or too hot (assuming this matches the temperature around you). So I am opening it to the wider Tumblr community: is it better to be cold or hot? "A comfortable middle temperature" IS NOT an answer, as it is obviously the best one and would skew the results. This is about the lesser discomfort, y'all, not optimal atmosphere.

[geometricfractal]

I need spirituality that isn’t based around belief in something Other. After all, when I dig my bare toes into damp grass and feel the tapestry of roots under my feet, is the feeling of groundedness in my bones not spiritual? When I stand in a crowd of two hundred people, all of us singing the same song together, is the feeling of deep joy in my chest not spiritual? Why must we only be allowed to make communities around belief in something beyond explanation? Is it not enough to bond over the shared connection of existing in this plane together, experiencing and feeling and being part of something more than ourselves? Are we ourselves not enough explanation for the power that connects all living things?

Let me lie down at the level of the tiny mushrooms and see how tall they grow from their own perspective. Let me gather with other humans and sing songs exalting the beauty of our combined existence, the mark we can make on this world with only the force of our joy. Let me find community in this world, and let me make it from what we have at our tangible, physical fingertips.

[geometricfractal]

if society wants me to wear jeans and not an animal onesie then why does my animal onesie have deeper pockets than any of my jeans

[geometricfractal]

Today it was raining. A good, steady, soaking rain, my favorite. The kind of rain that makes me feel at peace, like I can breathe deeply for a few moments at least. I wanted to go outside and stand in that glorious rain.

But you see, I habitually put off nice things.

“Oh, I’ll play my game after I get x amount of work done.” “I’ll do my craft once I’ve finished three things on the to-do list.” “I’ll have this nice snack when I’ve figured out this bug in this piece of code.”

“Oh,” I said to myself. “I’ll go out in the rain when I’ve done that work I’m planning to do.”

And then I stopped and went. “Fractal. Why?”

Because, you see, the rain could stop while I was working. I might never finish the project. I might lose interest in the rain, or it could get too cold, or any number of small things that would prevent me from ever getting out in that good, steady, soaking rain. Keep me from feeling at peace, from breathing deeply for those few moments I could, with one action, give myself.

It would be foolish to risk passing that up, wouldn’t it?

So I went out in the rain.

And I breathed.

[geometricfractal]

I have not read a single post on this website in the last hour. The text is meaningless to me. All I see is the one, all-important purple button.

boop