[Video Description: long video of a dog going casually through an increasingly difficult large outdoor obstacle course that requires a lot of balance, including walking on a two-line tightrope, and ending on walking across a balance beam on its front paws, back paws propped up on a wall. /End description.]

Ethan, you wanna see some shit?

[IDs: two spreadsheets with a three-word combo for each letter of the alphabet, riffing on "Live Laugh Love".

1st image: only a fews rows are filled in (the first column has every letter of the alphabet, omitted here for legibility):

G: gaslight girlboss gatekeep I: isolate ignore ibuprofen L: love laugh love M: mansplain manipulate manslaughter R: reduce reuse recycle U: ungovernable unmarketable unapologetic

2nd image: all rows + some honorable mentions:

A: alienate aggravate assert B: bed bath beyond C: catcall catcreep catalogue D: diners drive-ins dives E: expunge extricate explain F: flake fake fabricate G: gaslight gatekeep H: hero himbo whore I: isolate ignore iboprofen [sic] J: juke jebait justify K: kiss kick kill L: live laugh love M: manipulate mansplain malewife N: no nut november Ο: outwit outplay outlast P: plagarize popularize profit Q: queer quote queen R: reduce reuse recycle S: slay serve survive T: transpose transcend transgender U: ungovernable unmarketable unapologetic V: veni vidi vici W: weep whine weaponize X: xerox xanax xenosexual Y: yikes yoink yeet Z: zip zap zop hon mentions: stop drop roll fuck marry kill improvise adapt overcome

/End IDs.]

Still collecting the full alphabet of the “live, laugh, love” variants if anyone has some good examples.

Bonus if they can fit the “We can’t ___, _____, ____ our way out of this.”

creature in fiction: *is portrayed as bad and mean*

8 year old me: but what if there was a good and nice one :0

ⓘ A sewing machine is a device that provides a several-fold increase of the speed at which you can make mistakes

“If you have time to watch Netflix you have time for a side hustle” my side hustle is relaxing so that my body and brain can heal from by this nose-to-the-grindstone bullshit. I refuse to feel guilty for being a human with the need to relax sometimes. my side hustle is no.

If your friend comes to you and genuinely asks, "should I quit my good job with no backup plan or savings to try to make a living off of a DnD podcast I have vague plans for and no experience or equipment?" Then that's an acceptable time for a reality check, an earnest conversation about the risks.

Otherwise? You tell them to fucking go for it bud

I don't think many people realize how much they've been turned into a bunch of casually cynical jerks.

Someone may come to their parents and say "I want to write a book" and their parents will say "it's really hard to get published".

Someone might confide in their sibling and say "I want to sell my art on "x" platform" and that sibling will say "do you know how many people you'd be competing with? Do you know how many shops are even on that platform?"

I know a kid who once told his best friend "I think I wanna start a dnd podcast" and the friend was like "do you know what the word "oversaturation" means?"

Personally, I don't know why any of that matters? And even if it did, perhaps your response should be "Do it! Do it and see where it goes!"

Hey, take it from someone creeping towards 40:

Ignore the fun police.

If you like it, order your steak well done. Get your bagel toasted with jam and butter. Put ice in your scotch and ketchup on your hotdog. Get red wine with fish and white with steak. Who cares?

If you want to, listen to pop music. Watch blockbuster popcorn flicks. Read dime store novels. Enjoy them.

Dye your hair or cut it off. Paint your fingernails blue. Wear whatever the fuck you want on your own time (ie, when not at a job or school or whatever where you can get penalized for breaking rules) as long as you aren’t like welding or shoveling snow.

Anyone who tries to tell you you’re wrong? Say “okay” and go back to what you were doing. You’re not hurting them by enjoying yourself or having things the way you like them.

There are no caveats or addendums to this. No “but what about x?” Nah. You’re allowed the things you like. You don’t have to justify your taste or apologize for it if it’s not hurting anyone.

And likewise, let other people live their lives. We’re all dead in the long run, so tend your own garden before you become fertilizer in it.

It's this man's day, go wild

From me it's a messy paintover of that sketch from last year. I have to say, gold and turquoise are his colours for real

Also kewpie Cody for good measure

[IDs:

1st Image: Tumblr tags:

#not the point but 'assign friends a tragic backstory based on their weirdest kinks' could be a fun game

2nd image: screencap of Branch from the Trolls movie with a sad, angry expression, half-turned away from the viewer.

/End IDs.]

wait you understand that kinks are ok because they're fantasies that make you happy right? you all get that you don't need to have trauma for your kinks to be okay? right? like none of you think i witnessed a tragic accident on the pool toy assembly line right?

"How am I supposed to tell the difference between a child challenging my authority and a child asking for clarification because they have a disability?"

You're not. If you expect anyone to submit to your authority, you're inherently ableist. The system was designed to exclude disabled people and you're upholding the system.

You're always justifying your authority by saying that it's your job to teach them right from wrong. If you actually believe that and it's not just a bullshit excuse to justify your abuse, then you should be encouraging them to ask for clarification and reasons.

'kids these days are weirdly scrupulous for no reason'. WRONG not for no reason. grew up on increasingly de-anonymized internet, being available to everyone all the time, data tracked, google sees all, digital panopticon, etc. less and less space to explore and form own opinions without judgment from broad public audience. lack of privacy can be deeply traumatic and cause intense paranoia, obsession with thought crimes, morality, etc. not good.

As a person who spends a lot of time lying down and rarely does any kind of activities, I come off as someone who's taking a lot of 'me' time, or a lot of 'resting' time. However I have to assert that any time I spend recovering from an activity is not 'me time' or 'resting time', it's the time that is stolen from me. I can't do anything with this time. I am in pain, I can't move, my activities are limited to 'hopelessly distracting myself so that I do not experience the full horror of what's going on in my body right now'. I don't even get to have 'me time' because of how much of the time is stolen from me.

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

it's an individual mitigation, not a systemic one. the best mitigations to make public life more accessible affect everyone without distributing the majority of the effort among individuals (who may not be able to comply, may not have access to education on how to comply, or may be actively malicious).

it's a post-hoc mitigation, or to put it another way, it's a band-aid over the underlying problem. even if it was possible to enforce, universal masking still wouldn't address the underlying problem that it is dangerous for sick people and immune compromised people to be in the same public locations to begin with. this is a solvable problem! we have created the societal conditions for this problem!

here are my policy focuses:

upgraded air filtration and ventilation systems for all public buildings. appropriate ventilation should be just as bog-standard as appropriately clean running water. an indoor venue without a ventilation system capable of performing 5 complete air changes per hour should be like encountering a public restroom without any sinks or hand sanitizer stations whatsoever.

enforced paid sick leave for all employees until 3-5 days without symptoms. the vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through industry sectors where employees come into work while experiencing symptoms. a taco bell worker should never be making food while experiencing strep throat symptoms, even without a strep diagnosis.

enforced virtual schooling options for sick students. the other vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through schools. the proximity of so many kids and teenagers together indoors (with little to no proper ventilation and high levels of physical activity) means that if even one person comes to school sick, hundreds will be infected in the following few days. those students will most likely infect their parents as well. allowing students to complete all readings and coursework through sites like blackboard or compass while sick will cut down massively on disease transmission.

accessible testing for everyone. not just for COVID; if there's a test for any contagious illness capable of being performed outside of lab conditions, there should be a regulated option for performing that test at home (similar to COVID rapid tests). if a test can only be performed under lab conditions, there should be a government-subsidized program to provide free of charge testing to anyone who needs it, through urgent cares and pharmacies.

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

I enjoy adding "as one does" in parentheses after describing a strange thing to do (as one does).

I’m not sure who needs to hear this but it’s normal and okay to be DISABLED by your DISABILITY.

Sometimes it is going to stop you from doing things, and that’s okay. Sometimes it’s going to get in your way or make you struggle or cause problems in your life. But that’s okay, that’s why it’s called a disability.

You don’t need to fight yourself or “not let it hold you back” because a lot of times it will, but that’s the point.