Nykthos

Today in Not The Onion:

Important note: it is not a commercial product meant to be sold to users; it's an art thing.

They're always eating everything

THE LAST OF US — 01 x 03, “Long, Long Time”

Send me weird looking ants I want to see creatures

leptomyrmex my long-legged beloved

(Image source: jordandean_films on instagram)

(Image source: Alex Wild, independent website)

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.

It's 1am and I'm buying 120m of wood on the internet because I needed a door so I'd say adulthood is going alright

Metres? Like? Square? Or is this gonna be one long, thin door?

Had to pay $50 delivery for the door anyways so I figured I'd also get as much material as I could for my next project to avoid paying another $50 to get that delivered at a later date.

Love the way this is phrased like a 120m2 door would make more sense

Full human body has 2 square meters of skin. So that’s like 60 skin-suits worth of door. If that helps anyone else visualize it.

thanks Babs, we can always count on you

this website is free bc no one would ever pay to see this post

#i feel so dumb for reading “120m of wood” as 120 minutes of wood#as if op had to pay to get to watch a video of wood for 120 minutes#holding my head in my hands#<33

Pay-per-view is getting very uninspired

Meanwhile I thought you bought 120m of planks to assemble a door by yourself.

Yeah the castle needs a new gate

Oh is that not what the 120m of wood is for? It’s to build your own door + some other project right?

I purchased a door. It comes with a $50 delivery fee. If I'm paying a $50 delivery fee then I am getting the maximum amount of materials (for my next couple of projects) that I can get for $50. I'm not paying this fee 3 or 4 times as I stock up for each project separately.

#ok but derin you have to see how the original post was not super clear on how the 120m of wood and the door were connected

Nothing in my life is clearly connected. My neighbour's cat was bugging me for food so now I'm drinking fruit juice. Nevertheless, we prevail.

tbh i kind of assumed you were building the door but just bought More Wood Than Needed. because doors are wood, so my brain just went "yeah derin's probably got a weird-sized doorframe that needs a custom door or something like that."

while i knew you could buy A Door, having not done any of my own home renovations before it a) isn't something i had thought about much and b) isn't something i've ever tried to have shipped to me.

The fun thing is that I actually do have a weird-sized doorframe that needs a custom door, but since I'm not a masochist I just bought a normal sized door and I'll cut it down.

Derin that juice wouldn't happen to have looked like frozen pumpkin soup would it

Same juice but I did indeed know it was juice before drinking it

Feeling like a sims 1 sim.

yeah, you can go piss, girl... bit it'll cost ya

my christmas cookie decoration was the survivorship bias diagram

Oh nooo I hadn’t noticed that my cat’s automatic feeder was getting low on food so as usual she dashed off when she heard the machine start but I couldn’t hear the usual sound of her food falling into the bowl so I went to look and my poor cat was just. Sitting there. Staring at her empty food bowl. Then for a second she glanced up at me then right back to her bowl with the biggest, saddest, most bewildered eyes you could ever imagine on such a small creature. I filled her bowl and the machine right away ofc but I still feel a little guilty 😭

Quick artist’s rendition

colorblind pride flag just dropped

this post seems to have broken containment and if anyone's interested in what they were telling me to stop, i found the og post with this song and was mass reblogging it at an alarming rate. ive done this multiple times but i think this was the instance i reblogged it 64 times in a row

The everest chronicles

Slang

you’ve got a lil’ somethin’ right there

News from Pangur Bàn… getting old, staying cute.

black classic tabby with high white spotting

I think this catte is experiencing V I S I O N S

I think this catte is

experiencing V I

S I O N S

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.