Here’s to everyone with chronic pain that for some reason feel better in the cold, who feel miserable in the sun and heat. Here’s to all us bitches that dispise the summer and get incredulous looks when we say so.
Girl group member who claims to be “queen of the laundromat” ans you think she’s being cute about spending a lot of time there or living but when pressed she is deadly serious about believing she has territorial sovereignty
Propaganda for Korrasami:“Korra is literally the Avatar and Asami is a hottie that can fight too. And they made people mad when the last episode aired and they were officially announced as together and I love that for them. Stay mad homophobes”
“…Do I really need to explain how korrasami is a canon queer battle couple?”
this creature looks like if my cat were to be somehow turned into a dog omg. big dark sopping wet beast eyes and everything, and he’s just as talkative too lmao
No you’re right and I love your cat. Spirit babies with big juicy eyes.
thing is - and hear me out - if s3 does by any minute chance incorporate any suggestion of a sex scene, it is imperative for me that they commit to the bit. i need crowley to nearly topple over trying to get out of his jeans, i need aziraphale to complain that they cant do anything downstairs because that would be scandalous, and i need them to trip over going up the stairs because they keep getting distracted. i need one of them to accidentally get an elbow to the face, i need them to have a long forgotten book digging into one of their backs, and aziraphale is horrified when crowley launches it across the room, and i need there to be hard cut to whickber street having a huge power surge, lines sparking, all the power going out, and every car alarm in a 2-mile radius start screaming, i don’t need it to be explicit or overly romantic but i do need it to be fucking funny
Someone tell that bear he’s not supposed to eat that with the skin on.
I live in South Africa. And if you live in South Africa and you have any contact with people from the US or Canada you might have run into a question about wildlife like lions and elephants roaming our streets. Most South Africans get pretty offended by questions like this. We are a civilized country, our large and dangerous wildlife gets contained in properly fenced parks.
I use to get offended by this until I visited a few places in Canada and realized that the reason why you ask is that some of your large and dangerous wildlife does simply roam the countryside and sometimes make excursions into town.
This honestly blew my mind. What do you mean, you have bears just walking around? What the hell?
north americans don’t all encounter deadly megafauna on our porches and front lawns but it happens often enough that we all think this is a reasonable amount of gigantic animal to happen to your house. so when we think of africa we kinda imagine it like this:
like. if we had elephants here. this is what we would be putting up with on the regular. what do you mean you guys are more sensible than us.
TELL ME AGAIN HOW AUSTRALIA IS THE DEATH COUNTRY We have two spiders and (apparently) 12 snakes but we don’t have lions, bears, wildcats, AND crocodiles. We sometimes have crocodiles and large boas in certain areas. We don’t have to worry about a bear attacking our halloween decor. Or moose deciding to joust on the front lawn.
Maybe similar to Africa, America’s fear of Australia is because you all assume our wildlife is exactly as huge and space-invadey.
oh yeah i forgot about the gators
I live halfway between two large cities in a pretty damn suburban area and hearing the sentence “did you hear there was a bear* spotted on [road that is pretty built up and I don’t think of as wild at all]” only left me a little surprised. My mother once saw what she described as a coyote going to school- just walking around a university campus.
so…. yes I was absolutely picturing elephants reaching over your back yard fences for some tasty leaves.
* Ursus americanus for clarification not homosexual sapiens
Couple years ago we had a bear in the market of downtown Ottawa. Ottawa has a population of 1 million, and it made it to the largest market (byward), and had to be removed with sedatives.
My wife works at a call center. One of the more common complaints she fields is bears in the high end apartment complexes.
I live in the middle of a moderate sized metropolitan area, like, not downtown but geographically more in the middle than downtown, and we regularly get raccoons in our yard, but the more startling one is the flock of turkeys that periodically wanders down the extremely busy street in front of our house.
Now, when I was a kid we lived near Wildlife Safari, and so within 5 miles of my house there were bears, lions, tigers, cheetahs, elephants, giraffes, rhinos, hippos, ostriches, and more than once as a kid I went on a walking tour of what is normally a drive-through, minimally caged wildlife preserve. Not the tiger or lion compound, but yes, the cheetah compound. That was back before they had a publicly available bear exhibit, it was a school project one year to design the new bear exhibit.
So I have pictures like this, taken from my car:
I was in a minivan. I was looking up. It was looking down. I could see the underside of its belly when it walked by. Do not underestimate the size of giraffes.
(wildlife safari is many many acres, and most of the park, the animals are out in the open and people drive through very slowly in cars. The predators have separated enclosures but you still drive through, except the tigers and the bears, which you drive next to. Lions mostly ignore the cars. Tigers and bears would not.)
But the animals there almost never got out. The park is pretty big, but it was really not far from my house.
kids remind me, often, of the things i’ve taught myself out of.
i have a big dog. he looks like a deer. he is taller than most young children. while we were on a trail the other day, a boy coming our direction saw us and froze. he took a step back and said: “i’m feeling nervous. your - your dog is kind of big.”
goblin and i both stopped walking immediately. “he is kind of a big dog,” i admitted. “he’s called a greyhound. they are gentle but they are pretty tall, which is kind of scary, you’re right. their legs are so long because they are made for running fast. i am sorry we scared you. would you like us to stand still while you move past us, or would you feel more safe in your body if we move and you stay still?’
"oh. i didn’t know that about - greyhounds. i think i … i want to stay still,” he said. at this point, his adult had caught up to us. “i’m nervous about the dog,” he told her, “so i’m - i’m gonna stay still.” she didn’t argue. she didn’t make fun of him. she just smiled at him and at me and held his hand while goblin and i, with as wide of a berth as we could make, crept our way through.
behind us, i heard him exhale a deep breath and kind of laugh - “he was really big, huh? she said it’s because greyhounds have to go fast.”
“he was big,” she said. “i understand why that could have made you a little scared.”
“yeah. next time i - next time do you think i could maybe ask to touch him? when - i mean, next time, maybe, if i’m not nervous.”
later, going to a work event, in the big city, i stood outside, trembling. my social anxiety as a caught bird in my chest. i took a deep breath and turned to my coworker. she’s not even really my friend yet. i told her: “i feel nervous about this. i am not used to meeting new people, ever since covid.”
she laughed, but not in a mean way. she said she was nervous too. she reached her hand out and held mine, and we both took another deep breath and walked in like that, interlinked. a few people asked us - together? - and i told the truth: i feel nervous, and she’s helping. over and over i watched people relax too, admitting i feel really kind of shy lately actually, thank you for saying that.
the next time i go to an event, and i feel a little scared, i ask right away: wanna hold hands? this feels a little dangerous. i hesitate less. i don’t hide it as much. i watch for other people who are also nervous and say - it’s kinda hard, huh?
i know, logically, i’m not good at asking for help. but i am also not good at noticing when i need help. i’ve trained myself out of asking completely, but i’ve also trained myself to never accept my own fears or excuses. i have trained myself to tamp down every anxiety and just-push-through. i don’t know what i’m protecting myself from - just that i never think to admit it to anyone.
but every person on earth occasionally needs comfort. every person on earth occasionally needs connection. many of us were taught independence is the same thing as never needing anything.
each of us should have had an adult who heard - i feel nervous and held our hand and asked us how we could be helped to feel safe. no judgement, and no chiding. many of us did not. many of us were punished for the ways that we seemed “weak”.
but here is something: i am an adult now. and i get nervous a lot, actually. and if you are an adult and you are feeling a little nervous - come talk to me. we can hold hands and figure out what will help us feel safe in our bodies. and maybe, next time, if we’re brave, we can pet the dog that’s passing.
but I do love the end of ancillary mercy, though. from anaander’s perspective she’s having this bizarre standoff with, like, a toaster which has managed to traumatize a not insignificant portion of its crew. but fortunately the toaster has agreed to surrender. so it shows up and is like “I know you said to come alone, but the emissary ambassador of the titan alien magicians decided to tag along and we all know there’s nothing I could’ve done about that anyway. oh, and this microwave who we found in the dumpster of a waffle house is here too, says it’s got a three thousand year old grudge against you. anyway, I’m not actually surrendering. I’ve actually formed a coalition with the fridge.”
ALT
