Pinned
Hey you all know about that fungus that possesses ants to make them climb on the tip of grass blades in hopes of getting eaten by a cow, so that the fungus can continue its life cycle in the cow's guts? Because I think that's the kind of thing that's wrong with cave divers.
We don't know what's down there. We don't know what's gotten into their heads that makes them so determined to physically, personally go down there to find out. But I wouldn't entirely dismiss the possibility that whatever has gotten into them is very invested in getting eaten by whatever is down there.
The Web and the Buried
Five asexuals are playing cards.
One starts to explain the rules:
I’d say no cheating, but there are already five aces at the table.
just a reminder that apparently anybody who isn’t ace cheats
this literally says the aces are cheating…………. because… you can’t have five aces in a deck………….it’s the Opposite of the second comment…
Reading comprehension on this site is piss-poor
How dare you say aces piss on the poor
Happy pride y'all
How dare you say we should take pride in pissing on the poor
I know this is a joke but like, yeah. It is. I promise you.
See, I had graduated early from highschool and then got my associates in Zoology. But then, from ages 18-23, I was medicated with antipsychotics and (for those last two years) a deadly combo of sedatives due to misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis, and then a psychiatrist who was legitimately on drugs and just writing random shit that almost killed me.
Anyway, needless to say, my brain turned to mush and stopped working, and it took me 6 years to get some sort of bachelors degree (in fashion??) and I graduated at the bottom of my class.
And then I got properly diagnosed (the “psychosis” was just narcolepsy) and got off all those meds. And I was so afraid my brain was permanently fucked. And it is, cause of the narcolepsy part, but the narcolepsy doesn’t kill the parts of your brain where your smarts are.
But I went back to school. Got another bachelors studying sustainable tourism. Turns out my smarts hadn’t gone anywhere when my brain turned to mush. I graduated with a 3.98 GPA.
Now I’m getting my masters in biology studying the intersection of tourism and the conservation of the critically endangered Cozumel raccoon. And doing well. 🤷🏻♀️
Your brain is not a muscle in the literal sense, but it is a muscle in the sense that the more you use it, the better developed it becomes. Not using it might make its usefulness dip for a bit, but that doesn't mean it's gone forever. You might have to work your way back up, start with easier exercises (puzzles, creative exercises, critical thinking questions) before jumping back into the stuff you used to do, but like a couch to 5k slowly ramp up the difficulty and you'll get there in the end. No one's brains are useless, you just gotta meet 'em where they're at.
the rubber duck
For anyone curious what they mean by the rubber duck, rubber duck debugging is a tactic used by programmers to figure out bugs in the code. To do it, they explain the code, verbally, line by line, to the rubber duck until they find it.
It’s also very useful for writers, and I’ve used it multiple times with rubber ducks, stuffed animals, and my friends.
“when i say it out loud i realize where the stupid was”
I literally cannot count the number of times I’ve gone to someone and told them ‘I can’t figure out what’s wrong with my story, please let me explain it to you’ and that was all it took. Sometimes they ask helpful questions like ‘did you remember to feed them’ or ‘so is this all on the same day’ but other times I don’t even need that, it just figures itself out as soon as I try to explain it to someone else.
It’s one of my go-to pieces of writing advice. You’re stuck on your story? sit down and tell me/someone all about it.
In Gotham, no one ever says they’re going to kill themselves. Instead, they threaten to become a rogue. Bruce hates it as he has to put everyone who does that on a watchlist and he can’t keep track of that many people. One time, a man threatened to become Condiment King 2.0 and Bruce burst into tears. He cannot deal with another one.
Thinking again about how Suzanne esentially subverted the "beloved famous man that is actually a horrible person in real life" with Finnick, who is the complete opposite of that.
Finnick has this whole image costructed around him by the people that abused him for years: the Capitol's darling, their golden boy, the sex symbol of Panem, the man that has countless lovers but leaves them constantly and doesn't look back etc. And you would expect, initially, to meet a man that retains at least a part of that persona in his day to day life. But Finnick doesn't, not even one bit.
You see instead a man that is deeply in love and completely devoted to the one woman he quite literally adores, a man that protects Mags, his old mentor and his mother figure, as much as he can, a man that wouldn't leave Johanna behind, a man that gathers whatever strenght he has left to speak publicly about the abuse inflicted upon him at the government's hands; the opposite of what the Capitol's media and reputation made him out to be.