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Here's a nice story I learned in the Norwegian ski museum:

In 1895, polar explorers Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen were having a bad time. Their expedition had faced some hardships and they were forced to stay on Franz Josef Land in a little hut they built out of mud and stones. In their hut, they slept for circa 20 hours a day, and spent the remaining four hours watching the northern lights or reminiscing about the comforts of home and the books they had read.

After several months of this, and nine months of sleeping in the same sleeping bag to stay warm, on New Year's Eve, Nansen finally gathered his courage and asked Johansen if they should start adressing each other with the informal you.

This is where the story ended in the museum, so unfortunately, I can't tell you whether Johansen answered yes or no.

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You’re tired. Burnt out. Exhausted. Stressed.

This lowers your capacity for emotional regulation.

You’ll cry more easily. Get dragged into low moods more easily. Simple little things where you’re like ‘dang, that shouldn’t hit so hard,’ will wallop you.

This will trick you into thinking you’re weak and can’t handle life. A loser.

Not so my friend.

It’s a signal that you need a nap, need to allow for more sleep at night, need to prioritize and scale back on what you can accomplish in a day, need to take a mental health day or even a leave.

Something’s got to give.

But!

It’s not your self worth.

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A little ceramic barn owl! The painted patterns are inspired by motifs found on old New England gravestones.

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Thinking about how I would write an adult Scooby-Doo series, because I think it can be done.

The first thing I’d do is make the characters actually be adults.  Still young, but adults, in the mid to late 20s range.  Mystery Inc. is a private detective type business that they run together.  In this universe, the supernatural/ghosts/etc are real, but not necessarily common, so when they take on a case, the culprit might be a person disguised as a monster, or it might actually be a real ghost.  The stakes can be higher; sometimes a bad guy is legitimately trying to kill them.  Sometimes the mystery they’re trying to solve is a murder.  Sometimes they actually get hurt on their cases.

Fred: the core of Fred’s character should be that he’s incredibly kind.  Like, give a stranger the shirt off his back kind.  The “Fred can’t talk to potential clients because he might take a case for free and we need to eat” kind.  He’s an honest and good person and sometimes gets himself into trouble because he assumes other people are too.  While he’s not very good at reading people or noticing ulterior motives, he’s brilliant when it comes to mechanical or engineering type stuff, so he’s the one who keeps the mystery machine running, builds their gadgets, and of course, designs the traps.

Daphne: she comes from old money, and her parents absolutely despise her life choices, to the point where they haven’t officially disowned her, but they have basically cut her off, so she doesn’t actually have access to any family money.  Growing up wealthy has granted her a variety of skills, including speaking multiple languages, horseback riding, and fencing.  She’s very into fashion and jewelry (even if she can’t afford it anymore) and has extensive knowledge of both that can occasionally provide a vital clue in a case. And even though her parents have cut her off, Daphne still has a wide network of contacts she can ask for favors sometimes, because she’s personable, and people tend to like her.  Daphne is also very emotionally intelligent, and is usually the one who can spot when someone is lying to them.

Side note - I ship Fred and Daphne, so I think I would start them off as an established couple for this universe.  Dating, engaged, married, I don’t care.  They are stupidly in love, ride or die for each other.  There’s no will they, won’t they, no worries about cheating.  They are in a healthy, happy, loving relationship, and no one (not even Daphne’s disapproving parents) are going to mess that up for them.

Velma: she is the forensics nerd who sometimes gets super excited about the wrong thing at the wrong time (”He was mummified in seconds? That’s so cool!” “Velma!  His wife is standing right there!” “Oh.  Sorry.”).  She’s not purposely insensitive, she just gets laser focused on her work and forgets to filter herself sometimes.  She’s also the one who can get so fixated on solving whatever mystery they’re working on, she’s willing to bend or maybe break laws.  Is breaking and entering really so bad?  Not if it gets them answers.

Shaggy: he is still the comic relief, but he’s the comic relief by being the only person in the group that actually has common sense.  He manages the business’s finances, he’s the only one who knows how to cook, and the others tease him for being a coward sometimes, but Shaggy maintains that if a ghost with an axe is coming for you, running is the only sensible option.  He should also have a range of random knowledge that sounds useless, but sometimes saves the day (ex ventriloquism, origami, the history of spoons, etc).

Scooby: as this is a universe where supernatural creatures exist, Scooby is an ancient eldritch type being that took a shine to Shaggy when he was a kid, and took the form of a talking dog to befriend and hang out with him.  Aside from the talking dog bit and not aging, he never uses his powers in a way that anyone notices.  The audience is not told upfront that Scooby is an ancient eldritch being; it should slowly be hinted at throughout the series so the audience put it together, but the characters never realize it.  Scooby genuinely considers Shaggy to be his best friend, and cares about the rest of the gang too.

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Just a dandy boy 🌻

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Ages ago I was listening to a podcast about class divide and depictions of poverty in media and at one point one of the hosts said

“We often talk about the rich not understanding what it’s like to be poor and while that’s true it’s also true for most of us. We might think we understand it because we think we’ve seen it on tv but in reality we all tend to think of “poor” as the poorest we’ve been ourselves. Unless we’ve actually been poor or been close to someone who is or was poor we don’t really understand what that means. What most of us think of as poor is lower-middle class”

Basically his point was that being poor means something different in different countries but a lower-middle class person in the west doesn’t truly understand what a person sharing an apartment with 10 other people just to get by has to go through and that person doesn’t understand what a person who had to live in a storm drain for a while had to struggle with unless they were that person. That’s why “poor people” in movies and shows are never all that poor. Both because the writer never experienced the sort of poverty they’re trying to portray but also because most viewers wouldn’t understand it and constantly question why the character was living like that. Some think poor means not having a car because they had to live without one for a while, while others think poor means not being able to pay for a streaming service. Our idea of poverty is shaped by our own experiences. Thoughts?

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sometimes the moral of the story really is just "you cannot go back and what happened to you is going to be with you for the rest of your life. but it's still going to be okay" huh

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Say not the Struggle nought Availeth

Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain. If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field. For while the tired waves, vainly breaking Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright.

- Arthur Hugh Clough.

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laundry day 🧺 | prints here

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My favorite thing about the asexual community is the shared experience we all seem to have where we all just thought sexual attraction was fake or exaggerated. We all went years thinking that the rest of the world was just joking, and then we’re all shocked when we find out that they’re actually serious. Love that for us.

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To put it very bluntly.

You will always make a better impact helping people who need it than trying to hurt people you think deserve it.

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being on the aro spectrum would be a lot easier if being single wasn't made to feel like a literal death sentence

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Why are so many romantasy dudes just "hi my name is Elias Dark’ness Demon Raven Brave and I have short ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches the hilt of the sword on my back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like rhysand (if u don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to rhysand but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie. I’m a vampire but my teeth are straight and white. I have pale white skin. I’m also a shadow master, and I learned magic in The Shadow Court where I’m in the seventh in line for the throne (I’m one-hundred-and-seventeen). I’m traumatised (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly black. I love Hot Topic and I buy all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a black tunic with matching lace around it and black leather pants, no girly pink fishnets but yes black combat boots. I was not wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow, i just look like that. I was walking outside the castle. It was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. A lot of females stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them."

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NaPoWriMo #13: A poem involving a tall tale

My Baby Sister

My baby sister's better than your kid could ever be Though she was born just last July, she's twice as big as me! When she was only three days old she learned to read and write She finished every book we owned by ten o'clock that night Before the month was over she had three advanced degrees And just a few days later she could crawl upon her knees!

The day she learned to walk she proved a prodigy in dance She's prima ballerina with the best ballet in France As concert violinist, she brings every crowd to tears The music critics claim she’ll be the artist of the year She’s a painter, poet, author, who’s won every single prize She rarely even needs a pacifier when she cries!

She’s won Olympic medals for her acrobatic grace She’s come in first in ev’ry marathon and swimming race She’s headed up initiatives to plant a billion trees She's saved the whales, the elephants, and fifteen kinds of bees All the nation-states are racing to express their gratitude And in a week or two she plans to start on solid food!

You say it's unbelievable, but every word is true. Trust me when I tell you there is nothing she can't do Put her next to other babies, I'm afraid there's no contest Every person who lays eyes on her agrees that she's the best Oh, I'd love to have you meet her, but it just won't happen soon She's far too busy being the first baby on the moon!

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So my therapist has been helping me get to grips with my ADHD, and also the concept that I’m not shit at being an adult, I just can’t do things the way everyone has always told me to do them. Like every single “organize your life” books have always left me wanting to cry with frustration, and after I got hold of a copy of Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD by Susan Pinsky I realized that was because they primarily focus on “aesthetic” over “function”. And the function of most standard “organize your life books” is to “make things look Show Home Perfect”.

So the standard “hide all your unsightly things by doing xyz” may look nice for the first week or so, but by the end of the week it’ll look like a tornado made of pure inhuman frustration ripped through the house as I try to find the fucking advil.

To give you an example of the kind of hell I’ve been fumbling my way through the last 20 odd years: dishes will be washed and left in the drying wrack but never put away. Which means I can’t wash more dishes, which means dishes pile up, which means I can’t make food, which means I don’t eat, which means my CFS gets worse, which means I don’t have the energy to put the dishes away, and so on so forth until I have a meltdown, cry to ETD (who also likely has ADHD but has never had it confirmed) about how I can’t cope with life, and then we fix it for a while, but inevitably end up back at square one within about a week.

Pinsky’s solution to this was “remove an obstacle between you and your goal, if that means taking all the doors off your kitchen cabinets to make things easier, so be it.”

And lemme tell you, fucking revolutionary.

Laundry never ends up in the hamper??? why???? is it a closed hamper??? Remove the lid. Throw it out the window. Clothes are now miraculously finding their way into the hamper??? Rejoice????

Mail ends up spread out over every available flat surface? Put a sorting station right where your mail arrives. Put a shredder or “junk” basket under it. Shred or dump the junk immediately. Realize you only actually have two real letters that need attention, feel less overwhelmed, pay your bills on time.

Like I’m not saying this book is miraculous, but it did help me realize that I was effectively torturing myself by trying to conform to certain ideals of “perfect house keeping”, and presenting a certain image rather than just allowing myself to live in my space as effectively as possible. And why? Why was I doing that? Cause people with different lives and capabilities are perceived as the norm? Fuck that. If this was a physical problem I wouldn’t be forcing myself to conform to an ableist standard, so why am I doing it with this?

My lived space will never look a certain way, and that’s okay. It will never look show home perfect, and that’s okay. It will likely always be cluttered and eclectic where nothing matches, and that’s okay. Sometimes I will have odd socks on because sorting them out required too much mental energy, and that’s okay. Actually fuck sorting socks, just buy all your socks in the same color. Problem solved. Boring sure, but also one less thing to do, which means more time to hyper fixate on fun things. Which really, what else is my life for if not to write screeds and screeds of vampire shit posts, I ask you.

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I wish people would stop saying “It’s July. Well done for wasting half a year.” Did you make someone smile in the past six months? Did you stroke a cat or throw a stick for a dog? Did you learn a new fact or teach someone a new joke? Did you laugh, cry, scream or sing in the past six months? Because if so, congratulations for not wasting your time at all.

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“You should be at the club.” No, I should be at the scholastic book fair.