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Spooky shadow creature can’t find its favorite stick

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being depressed and resentful is so embarrassing I feel like a cartoon villain

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Strange haunted photo where Winifred looks like she's a painting

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I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍

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i learned about a stupid looking bird today and i cant stop laughing

its called a crested satinbird (cnemophilus macgregorii)

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Reaching, tiptoe, lifting the bow down off its peg, still secure in the burnished case that held it, down she sank, laying the case across her knees, and dissolved in tears with a high thin wail as she drew her husband's weapon from its sheath.

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can we please please please learn to differentiate between things that are good but devalued because of their association with women (caring for children, being compassionate), things that are neutral but seen negatively because of their association with women (the colour pink, having long hair), and things that are bad but associated with women because of misogyny (being materialistic, being stupid) because otherwise we’re gonna keep getting takes like “being gender nonconforming is anti feminist” and “not studying for your classes is feminist”

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Pappy's rules for living

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Fight me!!

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I think people let JK Rowling's transphobia define her too much, we need to acknowledge her other aspects.

She's also a racist, antisemitic, and a Holocaust denier, we can't forget that!

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