truly nobody else is doing it like beefleaf. the most iconic. living in my brain so rent-free that we're single-handedly tanking the housing prices on the block. my beloveds <3

Poor unfortunate soul

...so I was looking over the OCs I've been tinkering with in heroforge recently (which so far have mostly been the ones I don't have other satisfying visual depictions for), and I kind of realized the lineup is like.

evil mage. evil mage. tapdancing-on-the-line-between-neutral-and-evil part-time mage. modern setting evil mage! khisit. evil mage.

Cannot stop thinking about Anne magill paintings. Maybe my new favorite painter. She just captures this ..,,,,,, dreamy feeling...,,, a certain tenderness..... a fleeting moment of contentedness..... like nothing else I’ve seen

Had a dream that there was a new Pokemon that was ghost type and it was like. Half a greyhound. It was a spectral dog that was known as one of the fastest Pokemon. And yet it only had it front legs. There were wispy floating stubs on its back half which sort of implied there COULD be legs, but they never reached even close to the ground. It stood on its front legs as if the back legs were still there.

I don’t know what this Pokemon’s name was but its appeared in many of my dreams so either they made it real and I forgot or I’m being haunted by a Fakemon.

Every time I see a duck I think to myself that I want to pick up that duck. There is a sort of quality of the duck that makes it feel like the act of picking up the duck would somehow be analogous to those strange videos where people use knives to cleanly cut through multilayered cakes. There would be a sort of accumulative act even without taking permanent possession of the duck. It would rather be more like pulling the lever on some ancient machine which makes a counter increase by one. The duck is the lever. I hope my meaning is clear to you all?

Conradyn Cunaeus (Dutch, 1828–1895), "Allegorical Depiction of Loyalty and Love" (detail)

would you put a discarded fruit sticker on my forehead in whimsical jest yes or no

Unburdened & Becoming.

Image ID: In a large circular hoop is an embroidered needle painting of a stalk of blooming goldenrod on black fabric. Underneath it in small cramped script are the words “unburdened and becoming”. A hand holds the hoop in amongst a patch of real goldenrod.

The phrase is lyrics from “8 (circle)” by Bon Iver.

Also just cause I get this a lot and have only just learned it myself, goldenrod is not responsible for ur seasonal allergies. Their pollen is too heavy to be carried on the wind and they rely on insect pollination! They just come into season the same time as ragweed (the real enemy) but are so much showier then ragweed they get blamed for all the not-fun times.

(I’m like on a single-handed mission to redeem goldenrod in the eyes of everyone cause I love it so much u guys, pls join me.)

Rewatching through EXU Calamity and I just want to give big props to Marisha and Aabria for going so hard on the “rip to that other guy but I’m different” vibes that the Age of Arcanum was overflowing with.

The ladies find a letter written in plain and simple language that essentially says “Wizards can’t be trusted with knowledge because they’re too ambitious so I won’t tell you what the tree does” and immediately went “well maybe not those ambitious wizards but we’re totally different ambitious wizards who definitely know what we’re doing and are so much better and cooler that we’ll definitely be able to handle what we find!”

The arrogance, the drama, the self-centered hubris of it all—god I wish we had more time with these two ego-maniacs!

not "they did nothing wrong" or "they are a horrible bastard" but a secret third thing: they did things wrong and I like that about them but everyone over-exaggerates their negative impact on the story

No "asshole" judgements here one way or another, but I will say as a trans person myself, I'd pretty strongly advise against doing this as-written.

The thing is, I think especially for a younger person who's just come out recently, a parent leaning on their child to "compromise" aspects of their transition for something the parent finds more emotionally comforting can be... really poisonous to that relationship. It communicates that the kid's attempt to define a new version of themself that makes them much happier, much more able to function as a full person, is a burden to others in addition to any other social or internal strife around the topic. I absolutely believe that's not what most parents want or are trying to communicate, but because of the context of the broader world we live in, that's often how it can come across, consciously or not, on the receiving end. There are already many large and small societal messages telling trans people that our existence is a burden, a problem, a difficulty for the rest of the people around us to accommodate. A parent also inherently has an immense amount of power (emotional, social, legal, financial, etc) over a minor child in their household, and that means a request like that already isn't starting on even footing between the two of you.

I think a way to bring up this topic in a way that's much more respectful and much more likely to make your mother's name something that could bring you and your son closer together, would be to ask your son if the two of you might be able to sit down and come up with some possibilities for continuing to honor your mother's name and memory that would actively feel good with the identity he's currently creating. That's a request that gives him the option of actively helping preserve something important to you, on his own terms, in a context that says this part of your familial history is a place where his newer sense of himself is just as welcome and belongs just as much as he did before coming out.

I don't suggest this as a way to definitely "get" anyone to agree to a request you'd make, and I can't say whether an option that feels best to him would be the one you'd also like the most. But I do think bringing up the conversation in a way that centers his agency, creates multiple possibilities to mull over and settle into over time, and reframes it as a new opportunity rather than a loss, is more likely to lead to a better outcome for the relationship overall, because it's making your son's trans identity a place to build, rather than a point of contention and hurt.

I hope this can be helpful in some way, and I wish both you and your son the best!

WIBTA if I asked my trans son to keep his deadname as a middle name?

So my son has recently come out as transgender. I’ve done my best to support him, although I still have room to improve since we come from a heavily Catholic country. As is common for transgender peoples, he has changed his name. I had named him after my late mother, who had never gotten to see him. It’s a very feminine name and I understand why he wouldn’t want to use it anymore. However, it makes me a little sad that it won’t be in use anymore.

would I be an asshole if I asked him to list his deadname as his middle name (or one of them, if he chooses to have multiple) when he turns 18 and legally changed his name?

if he doesn’t want to, I suppose I could always change my own middle name to the deadname, even if it wouldn’t be the same.

What are these acronyms?

the scientific name for the grackle is gracula quiscula so now next time i see a grackle i will call it count gracula

Ok so at this point I've had two people roll up to me in manual wheelchairs, well, one of them was somebody pushing somebody who was nonverbal at the time, but it still counts. They asked me why I had zip ties around my tires.

It's winter where I'm living and we have really bad snow. And the snow plow people are really bad at their jobs probably because there aren't snow plow people who clean sidewalks. As a solution I got to thinking about how I could increase the traction on my wheels. And the most redneck thing I could think of was taking a bunch of zip ties and tying them around my wheels. They last surprisingly long, and work surprisingly well. It's basically the same premise as chains for your tires during the winter.

I chose to space them out pretty evenly so there's about one for every spoke. You could probably do more or less depending on how many you want and how much traction you get but I wouldn't go more than three per spoke. I realize that it's a bit later in the winter, and I probably should have made a post about this sooner, but I came up with it about a week ago. So please share this, even if you're not disabled, because there are tons of people I know who are stuck in their houses because they can't get around in the snow. A pack of zip ties costs about $5, which compared to $200 knobby snow tires is a big save, and if you want to invest you could get colored zip ties.