One of the most memorable interactions was Saturday. Into our booth strolls a small family, tempted by free samples of freshly brewed tea. We chatter and give them the spiel, that the tea is character merch and we’re a cozy health-based app called Forage Friends.

The young girl zeroes in on our pride pins.

“They have my pin!” She says excitedly. “They have my flag!”

The dad blinks. He is surprised, but also calm and positive when he sees it’s the lesbian flag. “Oh. That’s… different from what you told me.”

“That was months ago, dad.” And she rolls her eyes. Definitely a teenager.

I turn to him and say, “Yeah, dad.” And we share a little laugh about it.

He says, “No, it’s great. That’s amazing, honey. It was just news to me.”

“Well, I guess I just decided to stop lying to myself. About liking guys. Like right now.”

A little lesbian just came out to her dad and he was super cool about it.

I’m standing there in my tie-dye mask and my cheery blue apron pouring tea and making small talk and I’m trying really hard not to cry or compare it to my experience, the fire & brimstone, the disgust, the conditional acceptance as long as I never bring it up.

So as this beautiful bonding is going on, the girl’s even younger brother turns his gaze around. He’s in a snorlax hoodie and bored and wants to go look at the swords across the hall. But on the other side of our booth….

“WHY DO PEOPLE DRAW THAT?” He asks loudly, and we all turn to our neighboring booth.

Our neighbors were extremely lovely people. Every time we had a break we would talk, and we became good friends over the weekend. They kept apologizing that their booth was next to ours and we kept repeating that it was totally fine. Their booth was great. I even bought their merchandise.

The thing that was so contentious, that they felt the need to apologize for, was that they were selling explicit titty hentai stickers of popular characters. They were censored with little yellow R18 labels but the content was very clear.

So back to the family: I freeze and immediately go somewhere else to let dad handle this question. With adult customers I’ve been loud and positive about our neighbors. (“Man, how has it been boothing next to them?” It’s been great! They bring a lot of foot traffic and they’re kind and wonderful professional neighbors. If anything it’s a fun juxtaposition. We believe in artistic freedom. I bought a sticker too!)

But this is a kid, it’s not my place to explain anything…. But I was extremely curious about what this chill dad would say.

“Well,” dad says with a long measured silence between each word. “Sometimes people are horny.”

"LOL this flip-flop wearing loser thinks he's gonna kick my ass and destroy my whole kingdom in the span of an afternoon. What an idiot"

I didn't intend for this to be a full comic, which is why it just kinda ends. Sowwy

they want to talk about mental illness and acceptance and how everyone is a little ocd it's cute and quirky and their "intrusive thoughts" are about cutting their hair off and you say yours are about taking a razorblade to your eye and they say ew can you not and everyone is a little adhd sometimes! except if you're late it's a personality flaw and it's because you are careless and cruel (and someone else with adhd mentions they can be on time, so why can't you?) and it's not an eating disorder if it's girl dinner! it's not mania if it's girl math! what do you mean you blew all of your savings on nonrefundable plane tickets for a plane you didn't even end up taking. what do you mean that you are afraid of eating. get over it. they roll their little lips up into a sneer. can you not, like, trauma dump?

they love it on them they like to wear pieces of your suffering like jewels so that it hangs off their tongue in rapiers. they are allowed to arm-chair diagnose and cherrypick their poisons but you can't ever miss too many showers because that's, like, "fuckken gross?" so anyone mean is a narcissist. so anyone with visual tics is clearly faking it and is so cringe. but they get to scream and hit customer service employees because well, i got overwhelmed.

you keep seeing these posts about how people pleasers are "inherently manipulative" and how it's totally unfair behavior. but you are a people pleaser, you have an ingrained fawn response. in the comments, you have typed and deleted the words just because it is technically true does not make it an empathetic or kind reading of the reaction about one million times. it is technically accurate, after all. you think of catholic guilt, how sometimes you feel bad when doing a good deed because the sense of pride you get from acting kind - that pride is a sin. the word "manipulation" is not without bias or stigma attached to it. many people with the fawn response are direct victims of someone who was malignantly manipulative. calling the victims manipulative too is an unfair and unkind reading of the situation. it would be better and more empathetic to say it is safety-seeking or connection-seeking behavior. yes, it can be toxic. no, in general it is not intended to be toxic. there is no reason to make mentally ill people feel worse for what we undergo.

you type why is everyone so quick to turn on someone showing clear signs of trauma but you already know the fucking answer, so what's the point of bothering. you kind of hate those this is what anxiety looks like! infographics because at this point you're so good at white-knuckling through a severe panic attack that people just think you're stoic. even people who know the situation sometimes comment you just don't seem depressed. and you're not a 9 year old white kid so there's no way you're on the spectrum, you're not obsessed with trains and you were never a good mathematician. okay then.

mental illness is trending. in 2012 tumblr said don't romanticize our symptoms but to be fair tiktok didn't exist yet. there's these series of videos where someone pretends to be "the most boring person on earth" and is just being a normal fucking person, which makes your skin crawl, because that probably means you are boring. your friend reads aloud a profile from tinder - no depressed bitches i fucking hate that mental illness crap. your father says that medication never actually works.

you still haven't told your grandmother that you're in therapy. despite everything (and the fact it's helping): you just don't want her to see you differently.

Test Tube Babies, Spleens, and Fruitloop Father?! NOPE. No thanks.

Danny and Ellie take a small, reincarnation, vacation from their duties in the Infinite Realms (King Danny and his most trusted Knight/Princess Ellie). Don't worry, they leave the Realms in good hands (Jazz, Pandora, Frostbite, CW, etc, basically Danny's main council takes over for a few years)

They both weren't expecting to wake up in an assassin cult though.... Nor to find out they're five year old twins now... Twin, somewhat clones of the leader and this guy Red Robin their 'father' is kinda obsessed with....

Great their 'father' is an insane assassin leader fruitloop and their 'dad' is named after a fast food joint... whose barely out of his teens btw.

Danny al Ghul Danyal, cast a glance as his full blooded and twin sister this time around Helen Ellie al Ghul who rolled her eyes as they listened to their 'father' ramble on and on about their 'dad' and how they were created to be his heir (Danny mostly, though he had plans on Ellie going to be trained to be his body guard by someone named Lady Shiva soon)

Yeah, no. Ellie dealt with one evil fruitloop father who cloned her once before, she's not dealing that again or falling for the 'I created thus I love you but not really' bs. They need to leave, like yesterday.

Hopefully their 'dad' is... okay he doesn't need to be okay with it at first but hopefully comes around to it, okay with the two of them showing up on his doorstep soon.

And you know what, they're gonna bring him a gift.

His spleen. Yeah it'll be good to give that back to him.

Since you know that was how they got clones to begin with... Maybe don't leave your DNA with people that can make clones next time.

oh ok so its the usual no-homo bullshit you always hear, good to know.

After David tells him that his ex has arrived for Career Day and it’s not even the Wheeler that he asked for, Steve marches over to Mike like, “What are you doing here?”

Wow, David thinks to himself. He’s been told that Steve has some problems with his memory - apparently he compensated for it with a truly insane online calendar - but he didn’t expect him to forget about a whole human being. Just, wow.

Steve loudly tells Mike that he’s never had a real job and Mike scoffs at him and tells him that he wrote for a comic book website for three years. Journalism is just writing with a fancy degree. Will and Mike created a comic book together so, “I’m published.”

“Robin is published,” Steve stresses (Steve’s best friend, David knows that one). “If that was the only qualification I wanted than I would’ve asked Robin to come.”

They start squabbling again in whispered voices so David turns to Dustin and tries to alleviate some of the awkwardness with, “Steve, uh, really has a type, huh?”

Dustin squints at him, “Did you just meet him? Today?”

it was inevitable as the tides, but it has come to my attention now that if i talk about how sexy Thrax was without specifying "thrax from cinematic masterpiece Osmosis Jones released in 2001" a lot of people get really confused bc they don't know who that is bc they're officially a generation removed from me at this point

rather than go "ugh kids these days" (like cmon don't be That Guy) or "ugh no i feel old" (I don't! guess I'm built different) i will ever so happily inform so a whole new batch of people can enjoy a something very unique and special to my heart that kicks fucking ass and hope they enjoy it too

and that a something is Osmosis Jones. especially the villain of Osmosis Jones. his name his Thrax. he is an lethal virus that is never fully identified (it's implied he is the Red Death, from the Edgar Allen Poe story, but real); other viruses don't recognize him, and he's so reliably stealthy and lethal he possibly hasn't even been properly discovered by science yet. he also only gets more lethal and dangerous as he infects new people, treating how fast he can kill his current host with fever as a PR he has to beat every time until he can cook your brain to death SO quickly after infection that he will go down in history as the single most dangerous illness known to humans.

so yeah take a look and appreciate what set the bar for my villainfucker sleeper code. they don't make em quite like this anymore. content warning for bright orange body horror. legit plays out like a scene in a horror movie.

stupid sexy virus

So it was established in the last episode that Taylor still believes in Santa (tbh I wouldn't be surprised if it's come up prior to this ep too but anyways-) so... Do you think (saint) Nicky been has portalling in every year since the betrayal to sneak in a gift for his son amongst the pile? That Cassandra doesn't even notice because it's just one among the many many presents she herself has bought and wrapped? But every year without fail... Taylor gets one gift that simply says "from: Nick" and well, obviously that has to mean it's from Santa (a conclusion which Nicky expects him to come to, and why he can sign his name at all, though he misses when he could just write "dad"). And one year when he's still quite young, a sleepy little Taylor actually catches Nicky in the act, and Nicky wishes more than anything that he could just *stay*, but instead he only softly tells Taylor to go back to bed, and Taylor thinks that Santa is a lot younger and a bit sadder than he expected, but what's he gonna do- not listen to Santa Claus? So he smiles meekly at the man he does not know to be his father, and hurriedly heads back to his room.

Also yes of course Nicky eats the fucking cookies left out of course he's not gonna pass up on free cookies (which are home-baked to top it off) come on that's a given.

The mysterious murder of D. Phantom

Batman faced multiple cold cases. Some in which he got involved. They were never pretty, neither the ways of death nor the age of the victims. But when he entered a building and looked at Jason's corpse (it wasn't Jason, it couldn't be) his mind went blank.

He tried to investigate as much as possible. But his path was always empty, with virtually no clue as to who was to blame. Bruce began to despair when he saw his son's corpse on the pavement.

A week after his fruitless investigation, the body disappeared, and an identical one washed up on the docks. His death seemed recent, but that couldn't be possible, maybe the corpse was moved, but why?

Jason even got involved when his father started pestering the whole cave with his increasingly crazy theories about the case. All they got together was a couple of letters: DP, Dick nicknamed him Phantasma, because his body always turned up in supposedly haunted places.

Interestingly, the solution was more obvious than that. Danny changed forms so many times that he burned his human body, altered and left it on the ground. Clockwork forced him to absorb it to manifest another (Danny thought it was gross, but apparently when he "died" his body was just pure ecto)

And well, maybe he didn't know how to control the ability, and maybe he kept burning himself, leaving an abandoned corpse but it was disgusting, okay? The stalker in the bat suit was also not easy to avoid.

smthing bout “boy” moms who post about how they r soooooo glad they don’t have to deal with girl drama is so internally misogynistic and it never fails to make me mad lol

same energy as when dads get visible upset at gender reveals when they find out the r having a girl. like does everyone just hate women?

no i will NOT shut up about Medic being a father figure to Scout!!!!! This is literally Father and Son Activities 101

I'm back to seeing news about Detective Conans movie 27 and. I've never been a Kaishin shipper because I've always liked the frienemies dynamic better, but it's wild that they're implying these 2 are related like ??? 😭 30 years of NOTHING and then they suddenly say these guys are cousins? Like... Kaito wasn't even canon for 99% of the series. Crazy. That's 3 decades of yaoi fancontent down the drain 💀💀

Forgive my asking, but what are you meant to do if you find hair in your food at a restaurant? Send the whole thing back to the kitchen? I'd of course send my food back over something larger or grosser, like a nail clipping, or multiple pieces of hair, but it seems like such a hassle for just one piece.

i don't think we talk enough about how genuinely fucked it was that people called in to vote on a child character's death. like yeah he's fictional but also what the fuck