Welcome to the chaos

Dad, how do I? 🥰

The party's adoptive artificial child: "I am incapable of understanding the human emotion of 'love', so I am unsure of how much assistance I can offer."

"Because you're a robot?"

"Because I'm twelve and I think kissing is icky."

I just realized that apparently I never shared this series here on Tumblr??  

I call it Living Paintings, as they are recreations of extinct animals that some artists actually saw and painted from memory, a long time ago.

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Recent updates to this series: Glyptodon and Thylacine!

This a a reminder to not fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy. Just because you invested time and energy into something, does not mean you should indefinitely waste more time and energy on it, if you decide it’s not what you want anymore. This goes for anything, from books, to relationships, to jobs, to hobbies, etc.

If it’s not serving you anymore, move on.

This is honestly one of the places I find Marie Kondo's advice most helpful. I stop, look at the thing I've spent time and money on only to realize I dislike, and I say, "Thank you for teaching me something about myself and my preferences. I think I've learned this particular lesson and we can part ways now."

And then I don't feel like I "wasted" things or made a mistake. I just tried one path of learning about myself, learned something, and now it's time for a different path. Works a lot better for my brain.

¿Pero que lleva en esa maleta?

Look, actual mimes are the fucking coolest.

Not only the skill at motion, but the comedy sensibility-when the suitcase starts *floating* uncontrollably instead of just being stuck-is fuckin’ great:)

"Do you ever dream of land?" The whale asks the tuna.

"No." Says the tuna, "Do you?"

"I have never seen it." Says the whale, "but deep in my body, I remember it."

"Why do you care," says the tuna, "if you will never see it."

"There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains." Says the whale.

"They will disappear." Says the tuna, "one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains."

"Maybe I don't want to forget," Says the whale, "The forests were once my home."

"I have seen the forests." Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.

"Tell me what you have seen," says the whale.

"The forests spawned me." Says the salmon. "They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home."

"Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?" Asks the whale. "They have bounty of their own."

"You forget," says the salmon, "That the oceans were once their home."

@bees-with-swords decided to do another pass at illustrating this two years later, your writing is so lovely

Flooflers

unsolicited parenting advice of the day tell your kids what to expect! If your two year old is anxious about when dad is going to get home from work, teach him to recognize what patterns indicate that dad is coming home soon! After lunch we will do an activity and then clean and THEN dad will get home. Listen when the calendar day starts with an S dad does not have to go to work!!

and if something goes wrong and today does NOT go according to the plan your little guy expects, tell him!! Hey, dad has to go to work after all today, but he will be home after lunch! Today dad has to get groceries after work, so he’ll be home later than normal. But he will return with more bananas! Focus on the positives too, give them things they can understand. Don’t just say “not today,” they understand the concept of grocery stores and unexpected trips. Just tell them the problem. You’d hate being in the dark about everything that happens to you also. Let them control their situation, even if it’s just their own emotions and expectations.

or even! Teach them to read an analogue clock! Let me tell you, church nursery in the 1.5-3.5 age group got so much less stressful and anxious for EVERYONE when I taught my kids how to read the clock. They don’t have to ask me anymore how much time is left and fish for answers I can’t give them. They know that their guardians will come for them when the long stripe on the clock touches the 2, and that if they aren’t there then then they’re LATE and they get to hold this over their parents head. Because they know their parents can be late. And they LOVE knowing when this has occurred. There is so much less anxiety.

anyway explain stuff to your kids, they want to know. This has been an unsolicited parenting advice PSA

Whoa this is actually great advice. Totally forgot kids can’t read clocks until we teach them. No wonder they’re stressed out all the time I would be too if I didn’t have my phone to check the time. That’s useful OP thank you.

So... @urbanprole started doing this thing with @mistresskabooms when she was little that worked so well that we kept doing it basically until she said she was too old for it. She struggled a lot with routine changes, more than most kids because, you know, autism is like that.

Every night, when it was bedtime, MK's bedtime story (along with any other reading we did at night) was: "Once there was a little girl named Cat, and she went to sleep, and she got up, she had her breakfast, she went to school, and instead of getting on the bus to go home, Mom picked her up to go to the doctor's... " and so on. Any changes in routine that we knew about would be called out explicitly in the story.

And then at the end of the story, Emet always ended it with, "and then she exploded," because that is objectively hilarious, especially when you're six. Sometimes when she was wound up at the end of the day, she'd interrupt every time Emet said an event in the story with, "And then she exploded!" because, look, it's funny.

But yeah, tell kids what to expect. So much of why kids get frustrated is because they don't understand what's going on and they have no control over their lives. When you give them as much control as possible and as much understanding as you can? You get fewer meltdowns.

i reblogged this already but then i realized minutes later:

"... and then she exploded"

"@mistresskabooms"

HANG ON

...

........

..........Cat?

Happy Juneteenth!

Regulate Wall St and Hedge Funds out of the rental housing market.

Personnel is policy, and this wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the Biden administration taking the strongest anti-monopoly stance of any president in my lifetime. (Granted, the bar is low, but this is genuinely good stuff.)

So a couple of extra things:

1. Biden’s allowance of aggressive pursuit of anti-trust practices is exactly why this is happening. Not only are they doing what previous administrations couldn’t or didn’t do, but they’re seemingly casting a wider net on what is deemed “anti-competitive”. In this case, it’s information sharing between landlords. This leads into point #2.

2. In 2022 ProPublica published a story about RealPage, a company that operates a software used to set market prices for rentals. How it works is that landlords that use the software offer up the information they have about their local rental market, and then that information is shared with whomever else has the software and they adjust their prices accordingly.

The issue is that not everybody has access to the software, creating an unfair advantage. Unfortunately, when one property owner raises their prices, others are likely to follow suit, meaning that even if they don’t have access to the software, the prices still go up as a reaction to “market pricing”.

According to this politico article underneath, “While the RealPage probes could yield a traditional price-fixing lawsuit, they are also emblematic of the Justice Department’s increased focus on information-sharing agreements across the economy. Last year the antitrust division withdrew guidance giving safe harbors to certain information sharing in health care. And the sharing of anonymized data in the chicken industry is the focus of a separate DOJ antitrust case.”

This is a thing that will continue to happen under the Biden/Garland DOJ.

If you or your friends can't afford housing, please reblog and then please vote for Biden. Nobody else in this election cycle (2024 presidential) will help you afford an apartment/house.

in addition to being part of the larger, predictable but miserable backlash against the aggressive and youth-heavy sex positivity push of the 2010s it's also just like. so fucking miserable that teenagers, who already by and large have so little control over their lives, are being taught to be wary and distrustful of masturbation, an act of bodily autonomy and free source of pleasure. like man, come on. kids in this generation are probably never going to have stable jobs or own homes, and they can't even jack off about it?

Not to mention: “Porn Addiction” does not exist.

Everyone needs to stop listening to bullshit puritanical Christian made up conditions.

this is a very good intro to criticizing the idea of porn addiction and a very accessible read; I really appreciate its addition to the post! I want to highlight this paragraph in particular, which I think is very relevant to many people who fear that they're suffering from some kind of addiction to porn, sex, or masturbation:

This is for the people who didn’t party in their teens and twenties. For the people who didn’t have that “coming of age” movie experience with shenanigans and revelations. This is for the people who mostly keep to themselves. Who maybe prefer things to be quieter and gentler. This is for the people who don’t feel like they belong in a culture that values loud parties and flashing lights. I see you. And you are valid.

Baby Snow Leopard