#i am a very stupid person sometimes

[biboybuckley]

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[sergle]

There's something about like. A certain genre of posts / Online Opinions about insecurity/depression/misery/complaints that are so unhelpful that they wrap right around to being straight up hilarious. and it's the ones that are more or less written to the tone of "Feeling bad? That's gross!" Like, just so you know, don't voice your insecurities/ have low self esteem, because that's offputting! You're gross and weird. Don't be insecure about that, though. That would be stupid if you felt insecure about people disliking you for being insecure. Not attractive. You should be thinking about being as attractive as possible. You shouldn't make comments about suicide, even if you're suicidal! Keep those thoughts entirely to yourself. Make sure nobody around you knows you're thinking about this. It would Make Them Uncomfortable. It's better to keep these thoughts in your head where they can fester. Don't post OR talk to friends with complaints about you feeling miserable or depressed. Tbh people who are sad/upset a lot? Kinda a red flag! You are probably miserable because you're a bad person and you've brought this on yourself. If you don't have friends, it's because you're awful to be around. Easy! Solved the problem for you. And no, there is no nuance to this, got it? So, make sure to feel bad about feeling bad, but don't feel bad about it, because, well, that's just gross. And annoying! You might've wanted your brain rotted thoughts to be Peer Reviewed, you might have just needed to vent- you might've been hoping for some comfort, to get things off your chest. Well, don't! Don't talk about thoughts or feelings that are negative with your friends, you'd be burdening them and that's only meant for THERAPY. #SponsoredbyBetterHelp #MentalHealth like, DAMN. that's so helpful. you're so good at helping. I um really liked the part where these are all hard and fast rules that encourage keeping feelings bottled up and keeping your friends at arm's length. That's really funny of you.

[lilybug-02]

How on earth are you so levelheaded? You are an aspiration and inspiration

Incidentally i'm not going anywhere if AI scraping turns out to be true--- i will glace/nightshade the fuck out of everything to poison the data *maniacal cackle*

Haha thank you. It depends on the situation, but I try my best to be pragmatic with things like this.

It's important to be skeptical of any "bad news" on a popular social media trend when you know it will enact panic and it doesn't have credible sources...

[cherry-treelane]

everytime i feel bad and stressed about my life i remember that i might be in a troubling situation and having a bad time but im not season 4 fiona gallagher in the clink after leaving crack on the counter which my 3 year old baby brother happened to ingest resulting in a fatal near-death experience thats wracked me with never-ending guilt and forever altered my life

[rolandkaros]

i know it's just like. sports. and especially tennis. but it's annoying how out of touch players are. just like across the board.

[piplupod]

feels like the isolation is a gushing wound and going to the centre is just a small bandage. i think perhaps i am not really ever going to feel okay unless something miraculous happens. i am retaining some semblance of sanity now that I'm leaving the house and socializing with non-family more than once a week, but i am still hurting more than I can really tolerate and I don't know what to do about it. there doesn't seem to be a fix for this that I can enact.

[rxttenfish]

hi !!! sending this on anon because i am rather nervous all things considered <:3 (i am lying to you, i have not considered 'all things'.) one monster prom fan to another (can we be compared using such broad terminology ? i feel as if i am domesticated compared to you... [compliment, or at the very least not inherently negative]) , i wanted to thank you SO SO SO VERY MUCH for giving miranda so much love and thought and mulling her over in your mind in such a ... refreshing way

i also really really really like miri , but i can only aspire to have your level of dedication . it feels almost like we are of totally different worlds... !!!!!

thank you for bringing in real world biology too :3 i absolutely adore your design for her so much (this is most likely not proper grammar, but it is very late and i am very cold and so i will hope with all my heart you will excuse this mistake. one of many, i should assume) - though !!!! i do have a question if that is alright ?????

i cant say that a marine macropredator of a significantly vibrant pink really strikes me as advantageous colouring - does the abyssal environment that you say the merfolk live in negate the need for camouflage and such ????? i apologise for sounding passive aggressive !!!! i am merely asking a question. cocking my head to the side if you will

additionally, i would like to ask something foolish. how do they acquire food? i dont want to say 'hunt', because that might seem insulting. historically were they built for stalking, or high speed chases, or...???? please, talk 'nerdy to me' as they say !!! <- in an entirely normal way befitting two strangers of course.

you know, i would have expected to hit the ask word limit by now. but it seems i have not. yippee !!!!

with my extra space, i shall add this: I ABSOLUTELY ADORE THE WAY YOIU WRITE MIRI . GOOD LOOOOOORD IT IS AMAZING HAVIJNG SOMEOENE WHO KNOWS WHAT THEYRE DOING IWIITH HER thank yoiu for making her at least moderately intelligent. i feel blessed <- is this all too harsh sounding???? im a little new to all this letter/ask-writing thing <:3

IN ANY CASE !!!!!!!!!!!!! THANK YOIU SO VERY MUCH. AGAIN. drops this and scuttles away

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/761693443676045363/1183251697129226270/ordered3.png

also i believe you can indeed tell, but i drew that in ms paint with my finger .. sorry that it looks like poop <:3

(moving the image out of the link just in case it breaks-)

AAAAAA THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!! this looks so WONDERFUL i love the way that you've shaped her head and how you've captured how Chunky it is... i know its one of the things people have the hardest time drawing with her so its just all the more impressive how well youve managed to capture her!!!

i also love the little doodles eeeee..... please feel free to toss all ocs at miri, its enrichment for her <3 ironically gentle chewing/biting is a Play and Bonding thing for merfolk so she shall happily Bites Bites Bites back-

(also i LOVE her smile!!! you arent anthropomorphizing in the slightest for that - miri often does have very human expressions in a way that's odd for a merfolk, because she effectively got imprinted during her time spent inland... and its politically useful if you smile and match expressions with the people you're trying to work with anyways)

ill also go ahead and answer your questions because i can! very easily clarify on them!

the color: actually, being bright red and pink is actually very common for deep sea animals, due to the way light works at depth! its why i decided miranda was abyssal, because that felt like the most natural way to explain why she's pink, since it's such an uncommon color in nature.

basically, different colors of light have different lengths! red is the shortest wavelength of light, and blue is the longest. water might be clear, but there's a lot of water in the ocean, and the more water you add, the more it filters out light - which is why the bottom of a pool might be dark and shady, but if you hold a little of the water in your hands there's no shade. the ocean is a lot deeper than a pool, and so it gets darker as you go down, but because it's also clear, it doesn't filter out all that light at the same rate.

red, being the shortest wavelength of light, gets filtered out first, so red often gets quickly darker the deeper down you go, until it's completely black! camouflage is dependent on the environment, so their color and brightness has to match the background, but it also depends on the light that's hitting the animal. it's why fawns have dappled spots, or animals might have black stripes, so they can mimic the light of their environment. and when your environment has no red light, well... red's a pretty good color to be!

because of this, a lot of animals in the deep sea can't actually see red either, which is doubly the reason why you might want to be red! think of it like tigers, and how ungulates often can't see their orange, making them look just about the same color as the foliage around them when they're hunting! miranda might stick out on land, but that's just because we aren't seeing her in the environment she's made for, where she blends in with everything else around her as much as a pure black animal.

(it's also why her bioluminescence is blue - blue is the longest wavelength of light, and the one most animals can see at that depth. if she lights up, then she wants to be seen, and she can even alter her silhouette to appear larger or smaller or breaking it up into multiple shapes if she needs to. it's why her tapetum lucidum is blue when light's shone on it, because there is blue light to be seen at depth, it's just very dim!)

(this is also why giant squid are bright red, and why the stoplight loosejaw fish is so special! the latter actually produces its own red light, and can see red light, which means that it has a secret light that won't reveal where it is but will reveal to it where its prey is!)

food: this is something that depends a lot, because there are actually multiple different species of merfolk, which is mostly my fault because i don't always feel like i communicate this the best. they're all slightly different in how they evolved to capture prey, with abyssals in particular being fuckoff huge ambush predators that attack from below, and others being shallower-water hunters or more adapted for smaller, faster prey - but they all evolved from an ancestor with a fairly consistent prey-capture method.

in short, all merfolk are ancestrally evolved to hunt whales and other large prey items, with all the extant species still holding at least a degree of this. primarily, they were ambush predators who were good at getting in close to their prey before a sudden burst of speed. they would work together in close-knit groups (one of the big pressures for their increasing socialization and larger brains, to coordinate such groups) to all mob a single prey item at once, hitting with force to cause sudden trauma, and then using their claws, double-thumbs, back feet, and mouths to hold onto their prey and refuse to be dislodged. they'd repeatedly claw and use their strong bites and massive heads to rip deeply into their prey, causing further massive trauma and shock, and if that failed, bleeding their prey to death.

think of it like the raptor prey restraint model, just further taking advantage of the fact that they were underwater, where no one else has hands that could potentially rip them off. being smaller and somewhat less-optimized for marine life compared to things like sharks and whales and large fish worked for them, because they had a novel adaptation that allowed them to take advantage of things no one else could, and the numbers to make up for it. this is, likewise, why they never lost their hands and fully developed flippers, instead making their limbs as flipper-like as possible to make up for it.

then as time went on and certain populations became separated from each other, they adapted for slightly different niches, but all remain fairly closely related to each other as a genus.

in the modern day, most merfolk don't really "hunt" for all of their meals, at least not in the same way that we might think. don't get me wrong, they still absolutely hunt and it's a larger part of their lives than it is for most humans, but they have options.

mostly, the merfolk theory for their relationship with nature is to invite it in. this is not to say they aren't controlling and pruning it, but they do live underwater, and it's far harder to keep animals out than it is on land, so merfolk accepted it and worked with it. they'll work to promote growth around their buildings and where they live, fostering the growth of sea grass and algae and coral and other sessile animals, encouraging them to set down and grow in these areas, and they'll then let more wild animals move in, further encouraged by these natural sources of food and shelter, on top of merfolk working even further to encourage them in. they serve as a functional cleanup crew for the merfolk in these settlements, being allowed to eat anything that merfolk might drop or go to waste, and even moreso might be purposefully fed at times, or have specific homes for them built. merfolk will keep encouraging them and taking care of them until they become a biorich hotspot, creating unique oasises for wildlife to live alongside merfolk.

however, this isn't just a free-for-all, persay. merfolk will also purposefully prune these populations and control how they form, often removing "problem" animals and encouraging certain behaviors which makes it easier for these populations to live alongside merfolk, not viewing them as a threat, but also not viewing them as an opportunity either. they will directly shape how these areas grow and cultivate them on a physical level, often using them as an easy shortcut to literally grow their settlements and buildings. but they will also harvest from these populations and selectively breed them, until their cities and towns act as massive public gardens full of food to be caught, picked, and eaten at any time

as there are also a lot of (very politically powerful) nomadic groups, they also do this, albeit not always so directly. they'll have specific shoals or "runs" of fish that they will follow behind and take care of, managing as they move through the ocean in accordance with the seasons. this is where the whales still factor in, because the nomadic groups will also take care of the whales, purposefully keeping an eye on their pods and taking care of them and, when the time comes, being choosy and particular in which whale they select at any given time to be hunted, harvested, and eaten.

(there's also the way in which food is distributed and managed throughout the merkingdom, since some food is indeed shipped and moved throughout the different areas, but that's a different story for another time and i've talked enough)

BUT!!!! thank you so much and thank you for enjoying all of this that ive been making with miri, and thank you for giving me an excuse to talk more about her <3

[disneydreamlights]

I would love it if people who know nothing of theme parks stopped talking about theme parks.

Especially if they think the only theme park is Disney.

Especially if they think all the problems in the theme park industry are exclusive to Disney.

[deansmom]

[nervous laughter]

ohmygod every time I say “I think Dean is autistic” and someone says “so’s Sam!” I just want to scream because that is the most allistic man I have ever laid eyes on

Is he neurodivergent? Yes! He has PTSD! But he doesn’t meet any of the diagnostic criteria for autism I’m so sorry 🥲 Sam’s interests were wide & varied, he had friends & relationships growing up, he doesn’t struggle with strangers as much as Dean does, he’s nowhere near as rigid in his thinking or habits. Like sure, he could be high masking but Sam “made fun of Dean in Mint Condition” Winchester? An autistic? 🤨

You know how some people like to go “are you autistic or do you just have cptsd”???? Sam has cptsd, but I totally get why you think he is.

It’s like, I totally get why people read cas that way as well, but I don’t personally read him as autistic. Because it’s not that Cas doesn’t understand or is lacking in social skills, he’s just an angel who thinks that our society’s rules are dumb & doesn’t care to follow them, and he’s so real for that. Here’s the difference

Cas: hello, Sam. I’m well.

Dean: you’re supposed to ask him how he is.

Cas: but I can see that he’s physically unharmed, and no more emotionally unwell than usual.

Dean: that’s. ……it’s just polite, cas. It’s what people do.

Cas: oh. Hello, Sam. How are you doing?

And then there’s Dean, who’s been masking all of his life and vaguely understands what’s expected of him in most social situations but if you drop him in a new scenario without warning and he doesn’t have a script prepared??? Big oof. See: this scene from 8.13

[nobodybetterlookatme]

Once again, my favorite part of my job is pissing off my medic and ruining their day lmao

[lith-myathar]

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[catominor]

This Years Thoughts On Reading. tbh

the past year i read a lot more than i had in quite some time. to be fair, i didn't finish most of the books i started, didn't start most of the books i want to read, and spent most of my time wasting time on social media still (i don't know why i can't stop doing this. i don't even enjoy it past a certain point). i didn't do well in my university classes. but for a really long time i've found it very difficult to read at all, even to read fiction. i read a lot of fiction (by my standards) this year, especially historical fiction set in ancient rome (though i also read some other good books, favorites among which are probably queer by william burroughs, night side of the river by jeannette winterson, and invisible cities by italo calvino. i also read quite a few short stories and a bit of poetry), i read or started /some/ nonfiction, i read or started /some/ ancient literature, and i had a poem and a short story published in my university's poetry journal and newspaper respectively...

but, really, i feel a little in over my head. i don't really feel like i can do this, by which i mean i still don't think i'm trying hard enough at university. i feel behind everyone else, despite the fact that since i've transferred to a different university having done 2 years before, i still have this and another year before i graduate. even though most of the people in my year will be 2 years younger than me i feel like i am behind them (did i mention that i did badly on my exams last year?)

especially before university i was never a particularly good student, honestly (i was like. a C average, though in my 3rd and 4th years of high school i started to try a little harder) and i think i spend a lot of time now fruitlessly wishing that i had tried harder and taken more of an interest in things. i still wish i tried harder. i still wish that passion was enough to fuel me to actually focus on filling out my historical reading. i wish i just didn't feel so stupid sometimes, honestly. sometimes i'll open a book that's a bit dense or technical and it just makes me feel like the biggest idiot in the world. i wish i was better at articulating my thoughts. i also wish i understood literary analysis or criticism. in a lot of ways now i feel dumber than i was a few years ago, and i don't know why.

[dumbassacademia]

Sometimes I do love answering phones at work bc a fairly common occurrence is like

Me: thank you for calling (law office) how may I help you today

Them: I wanna schedule a consultation for a divorce

Me: okay what’s your name

Them: (name)

Me: okay and who is this versus

Them, in the most disdainful voice possible: ummmmm…my wife?

Me:…

Them:…

Me: What is your wife’s name?

Them: Oh

[thedreadvampy]

it's been a strange arc so far

when I was 19-21 and having an extremely imbalanced relationship with someone in their mid 30s I was like 'we are both adults so the fact that this is fucking me up is my fault'

when I hit my late 20s and saw how young people in their late teens and early 20s seem now I was like 'oh wait I was so fucking young I didn't know shit about my own limits or about managing relationships and I don't know why someone in their mid to late 30s would be into that except for nefarious purposes'

the weird bit is now I'm into my 30s - not even that far into my 30s - and while I still wholeheartedly believe that last thing about how young (and self destructive) 20 year olds are, I'm also kind of like 'huh, actually nobody I know that age has their shit remotely together and frankly the reason this fucked me up is because NEITHER of us knew what the fuck we were doing it how to cope, for different reasons and at different life stages, and there probably wasn't any malice or intent to control as much as there was Blind Flailing.'

[torchickentacos]

taylor idk who chappell roan is i think that makes me disqualified from being queer forever (←sapphic girl)

She's a musical artist! She's pretty up-and-coming right now and is seen as a wlw queer icon in the music industry, but I've never been able to get into her music even though tons of other sapphics love it. I probably just haven't given it enough of a chance. Casual is a good song though!

[sherlock-is-ace]

i find it fascinating how intrinsically different i am from my family for the simple fact that I'm queer and they're not... They respect me and love me, even in their ignorance. And I can't really ask for more than that, but they'll never understand what it's like to be queer, they'll never see the world the way I see it, and that's absolutely mind blowing every time.