Goat-boots

huh weird.

I've been wondering if the enduring popularity of true crime and girlies with favourite murderers has primed Luigi to fulfil the babygirl murderer prophesys and get a usually dormant section of the leftist middle class to like... do.. anything

I copy pasted parts of this but I do hand letter everything, because while I'm trying to work easier as I'm chronically ill, I am still chronically stupid

This is the most notes/people that’s ever seen a comic I drew so I’m real glad it’s this one. I’ve been seeing peoples notes and genuinely didn’t know how often we’re all getting this response from people, what the hell.

i wish I knew why putting away clean laundry is my number one most hated chore. I think I would rather do literally any other household task

it should be nice! you're handling fresh clean textiles, you're handling your clothes which you mostly like or tolerate, and it shouldnt be physically taxing but for some reason it makes me angry and makes my joints hurt like crazy. I'm not using some sort of especially taxing clothing storage system, I just put tshirts and everything else that doesn't matter if it wrinkles into crates. I only fold or hang up stuff that absolutely needs to be. idk how to address this issue, I'm thinking about being a lot more militant about "daily clothes" and putting everything even slightly nice into deep storage but i think that might make me miserable in a different way

A friend had an occupational health visit years ago when he was struggling a lot with mobility and one of the very few things they did was give him a tshirt folder. It's very heavy and isn't automated, just a large shape you put in the bed and have to lean over to fold. you can only do one at a time. tshirts don't need to be folded and this made the process worse in every way. Since getting engaged, a decade later, his fiance also has to now use the tshirt folder. he recently realised that they possibly didn't give him this for his mobility, but his depression. its too late. now there are two otherwise happy mathematicians ruining their backs perfectly folding tshirts.

I am exceptionally lucky in that my parents never hit me, grounded me, confiscated my things, banned me from my hobbies or threatened any of these actions to make me behave as a kid. as an adult it has made me realise how very very long a road most people have to traverse before they can take a statement like 'no rule that must be enforced by threat is legitimate' seriously.

I really do mean this sympathetically. we are not well equipped as a culture to grapple with the implications of power and violence, because we are intimately saturated in it from birth. cruelty feels natural, and that's hard to unlearn.

a bunch of things that I know are going to sound really corny (which honestly I think is half the cultural problem - the idea that non-coercive parenting is touchy-feely, ineffectual or just kind of cringe - but that could be a whole other post)

the main thing was that they always explained things to me. if I wanted something I couldn't have, they explained why (from 'we can't afford that', 'it's bad for you', 'it's dangerous', all the way up to 'it's made by a big company that treats its workers badly, and we don't want to give them money'). If I threw a tantrum, they either waited it out until I got tired and bored or they redirected what we were doing ('we have to be patient and wait in line. if we don't wait in line, we can't go into the theatre. we can't wait in line if you scream and upset people. okay then, we're going home.')

beyond that, they always spoke to me like a full person. they asked my opinion on things and took it seriously, and asked me why as much as I asked them. apparently I had a phase as a toddler where I always wanted to be the first one on the swings / down the slide, and would throw almighty fits about it, until my mum took me aside one day and said 'why do you want to be first? are you worried the slide will get used up?' I laughed like it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard, and never kicked up a fuss about taking turns after that.

on the granular level, they focused on positives over negatives. My mum would draw little good behaviour charts for me, featuring e.g. me walking a long winding path through the woods with my soft toys. the path would be made up of, say, 30 stones, and every day that I was well behaved I'd earn a sticker on one of them. when I reached the end of the path, I got to pick a treat. something like a new plastic animal for my collection, or a day trip to the aquarium.

I do remember them sitting me down once and asking me to come up with what I thought would be an appropriate punishment if I ever did something really bad. I think my first suggestion was something like 'no TV', which was a real nice try because we didn't have a TV at the time. I don't remember what I finally decided on, it might have been 'no dessert for a week'. We wrote it down together and I signed my name, and they sealed it in an important looking envelope which they put in my dad's filing cabinet (for important documents). This would be unsealed if I ever did something Really Bad. the eventuality never came up, but the act of participating in the exercise kept me mostly on the straight and narrow. It's funny, the conceptual punishment itself wasn't even that bad. It was the seriousnes of the adult commitment I'd made to Behaving Well that did the trick.

When I DID do the standard naughty stuff, my parents would just sit me down and explain to me seriously why it was wrong and what impact it had caused for other people. They'd ask what motivated me, and why I acted on those feelings in that specific way. They would, of course, tell me they were disappointed. If necessary, they would tell me how things would have to change as a result of what I'd done. They were always, always open to hearing out my side of the story, and always, always took my feelings seriously even if they disapproved of my behaviour. they would ask if I was ready to say sorry and get a hug. if I wasn't ready, if I was still upset or angry, they would give me space in my room and ask me to come find them when I wanted to make up. and I always did, because I always knew they would accept it.

Damn, what'd you grow up on a star ship in the 24th century or something? Did you know Wesley Crusher? Did you get to meet Commander Data?

incredibly funny you should ask, TNG was one of the only TV shows we watched when I was a kid, and I had a homemade paper tricorder (TOS flip open variety). my mum took me to a traveling exhibition of original star trek sets where I did actually get to sit in picard's chair and see some deactivated Data heads. at one point we called an elevator and there was a family of cosplaying klingons inside complete with small child in full facial prosthetics. so ??? weirdly, kind of, yes.

surprisingly mortalityplays is not my blood sibling but rather a precious mutual i have never met, because my childhood was nearly identical. I wanted to reblog this with an actual post because I want people to know that parents like this exist in more than one place and it is not just one mythological occurrence. anyone can raise children like this and many people choose to do so! if your parents mistreated you in the name of "discipline" that was fucked up and you didn't deserve that, but you do deserve to know about it. also I was extremely well behaved as a result of all this. other adults would routinely compliment my behavior to my parents, I was not a spoiled hellion as a result of this star trek style parenting. it does work and it makes polite, reasonable, cooperative children who are easy to raise.

fascinatingly mortalityplays actually is my blood siblings and this is all deeply unrelatable, but I was late to the party and only have post parental separation memories, when everyone had less time was generally angrier. I think also having every possible learning disability didn't help.

It still helps though, this is to me what an older sibling was like (sometimes lol) I still wouldn't be able to read or tell time without him having made me little worksheets and encouraged me instead of getting mad. I'm 31 years old and my literacy is still very dicey so I have no idea what would have happened to me without him.

Deer oh deer

FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE

I copy pasted parts of this but I do hand letter everything, because while I'm trying to work easier as I'm chronically ill, I am still chronically stupid

This is the most notes/people that’s ever seen a comic I drew so I’m real glad it’s this one. I’ve been seeing peoples notes and genuinely didn’t know how often we’re all getting this response from people, what the hell.