#right now is sometimes

[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.

[help-itrappedmyself]

Dead on Main AU

Masterpost

Guys, I'm so sorry. But here's this!

~~~~

Danny blinks and he is somewhere else. He’s sitting at a dining room table, surrounded. There are so many people here. They’re all talking over each other, some yelling, some laughing. This scene comes as a great surprise to him, who -one blink ago- was trying and failing to do his homework at home in his room. Danny shoots up, his chair making a horrible noise as he pushes it away so fast it tumbles over. Everyone in the room turns to look over at him like he’s insane. 

“Oh my god, who are you people?” Danny did not mean to say this out loud, but at the sound of his voice he startles. Danny takes a moment to assess, and then, “Oh my god who am I?”  He is tall, and big, and this is certainly not his body, what is he wearing.

The boy sitting to the right of Danny, a little shorter than he is, with black hair and blue eyes (though now that he’s paying attention that does describe most people in the room),  starts chuckling lightly. “Uh, Jason? Are you good?” 

Danny turns to stare him right in the eyes. “What day is it?”

And he can tell the concern around the table is just ratcheting up every time he opens his stupid mouth.

“Did you hit your head on patrol?” The voice comes from the only blond and one of the only girls in the room, who's to the left of the person across from him. The person across from him is another boy with black hair and blue eyes who is studying Danny in a way that makes him uncomfortable, that under-a-microscope look that makes you feel like you’re failing at something.

“I have no idea if Jason hit his head.” Danny says. “I was just trying to remember if it was my birthday.”

And if he thought the room was busy when he first arrived here it is absolute pandemonium now. Everyone starts shouting and asking questions that he can’t even hear over the shouting. Someone with white hair in a suit just came through a door he didn’t even see earlier to stand by the only person not shouting, who -Danny would guess- is the only other adult in this room, witting at the head of the table. He also has black hair and blue eyes, and where almost everyone else’s reaction was panic, he froze instead. The person across from Danny also isn’t shouting, but the person next to Danny on his right has now fully stood up and looks like he might actually jump across the table to win the argument he ended up in. 

“Are you Jason’s soulmate?” is the main gist of the shouting that Danny can interpret but he’s more concerned with actual Jason at the moment. If they switched bodies... Then Jason might be in trouble…

“Hey, I forget, how long is this body swap supposed to last again?” Danny asks.

“Until you and Jason have physical contact. You have to actually meet.” The boy sitting across from him explains. He seems like one of the only ones that heard Danny talk, everyone else was still shouting. 

“Oh, that just seems terrible. What if we’re in different countries or something?” Danny complained. “Everyone in the world is just supposed to be able to drop everything and afford to fly across the world. The universe is really trying to screw people over now. Honestly, am I in a different country? Where even are we right now?”

“You’re in Gotham.” This voice was new, coming from the head of the table to Danny’s right. 

“Oh no. Nope.” Danny started backing away from the table, almost tripping on his overturned chair. “Absolutely not, no, how do I get out of here?” He starts earnestly looking for a door to get out of this place, but there are three doors he can see and he has no idea where any of them go, and doesn’t this room have any windows? What kind of a room doesn’t have any windows? Do they like to eat in a basement?

“Jason- not Jason. Uh, you need to calm down, everything will be fine alright, We’ll get you and Jason introduced no problem.” Danny swivels to track the voice and it’s the one who was sitting next to him, he’s walking towards him with his hands up and out in front of him. 

“I have to get home.” Danny breathes. 

“We can get you there, promise. Now, I’m Dick, can you tell me your name?”

“Your name is Dick? Who named you Dick?” Danny is so confused he’s stopped panicking. “How old are you for you to go by the name Dick?”

“Okay, rude.” Dick sounds like a petulant child so Danny’s estimations for his age are continuously dropping. “I’m 24.”

Danny snorts. “Okay.” The blond girl starts laughing over at the table. “I’m uh, I’m Danny.”

“Nice to meet you. Sort of. I’m Tim.” The guy from across from him had made it over to stand next to Dick. “There’s a lot of us here today so the one laughing like a hyena is Steph. That one there is Duke.” African-American, still with black hair but he has brown eyes and waves once introduced. “Damian is the short one next to him, and Cass was sitting across from Dick earlier. Our dad, Jason’s dad-” 

“Not my dad!” Steph interrupted. Tim waves her off.

“Everyone but Steph's dad, is over there, Bruce. Alfred, our butler is the one next to him.” Alfred gives a slight nod to his head. Bruce is just staring at him.

“So, names out of the way. You said you wanted to go home, where do you live?”

“Amity Park.”

[arnaerr]

I'm still having troubles with my job, so I would appreciate you buying my prints/or coffee or supporting me on Patreon 🫣

[fungi-maestro]

Happy tdov to fat trans people. 🏳️‍⚧️ Biggest thing that helped me as a trans kid was seeing older fat trans people. There were a lot of really irritating "advice" posts going around early in my time on the internet with a lot of misinformation in them, but one that I constantly saw (in addition to people claiming you should wear your pants rediculously low or only wear button ups) were posts saying you had to lose weight to transition. Can confidently confirm that is completely untrue. 👍

[batshaped]

trick(xie) question

[tam--lin]

The thing is, you don’t have to have a diagnoses to make simple “unmasking” changes that make your life easier. You don’t even have to self-diagnose! You are not appropriating anyone’s culture or struggles or hijacking anyone’s movement by allowing yourself to sway in line at the grocery store or buying a weighted blanket or using study or household hacks intended for people with ADHD. If you start favoring the needs that make your brain and body unique over the arbitrary norms of society, you’ll be better off, and you’ll be expanding the norms. It’s a win/win.

[torosdottir]

the fact that ur childhood affects ur brain for the rest of ur life is sooooo fucking embarassing. yeah i have all these things wrong with me and i feel kind of bad and weird all the time. why? oh umm well my mummy and daddy were mean to me when i was 5. no yeah i know. yeah and im still living like this. yeah. cringe 😬

[markscherz]

‘But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everyone & everything’

- Charles Darwin. Letter to Charles Lyell, 1 October 1861

[sentientsliotar]

So we’re all in agreement that Fizzmodeus is Stolitz without the pain?

Like ok yes there is pain-

But these two have heard of a magical thing called ✨communication✨

UNLIKE SOME PEOPLE

Which leads to shit like this

TALK TO EACH OTHER DAMMIT

[saglaophonos]

this is what its all about. at the end of the day

[smash-chu]

Long distance loneliness

[dogmotif]

hey me and my partner saw you from across the bar we want to kill and eat you

[ewwww-what]

Just watched boys night. Will never be normal again.

[sandeewithtwoe]

Venting to Nightmare is like telling him a bad joke

Nightmare belongs to Jokublog

Dust belongs to ask-dusttale

Transcript:

Nightmare: Evening, Dust

Dust: Oh JESUS-

Nightmare: I’m sensing you’re not feeling as usual. Is something bothering you?

Dust: You can say that, yeah. It’s just…

Dust: I keep thinking about how I spent so much time being so… OBSESSED with killing the human. I hated it, it drove me insane, but… I don’t know…

Dust: I think I kinda miss it..? The thrill, the hunger, the LOVE… maybe I’ve lost-

Nightmare: Pfft- heh heh heh

Nightmare: Oh, my apologies, I shouldn’t have laughed

Nightmare: Please, keep telling me how much your life SUCKS <3

Dust: …

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

A new challenger approaches (slowly)

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[notbecauseofvictories]

It's interesting to feel the grey malaise of winter trying to drag you down, and know (know) that the answer is to get out of your apartment and talk to some human people, but also absolutely hate the idea so much. so. very much.