Tiger of the Tundra

coffee-and-manslaughter:

pomrania:

metis-metis:

So ‘Sisyphus’ was trending on Twitter and it was just Classics jokes!

[Image description: twitter screenshots. Transcription follows.]

I had this joke about Odysseus, but it took, like twenty years to get to the punchline.

I had this joke in mind about the death of Hector but I didn’t want to get dragged.

I’ve got a joke about how Theseus escaped the labyrinth. Thread:

I had a joke about Leda, but it might ruffle some feathers.

I had a joke about Medusa but I’m too stoned to remember it.

I used to tell a joke about Icarus, but it never landed right.

I used to tell a joke about Orpheus but looking back it was a dead dud.

I have a joke about the ship of Theseus, but it’s not original.

I used to tell a joke about Odysseus and the Cyclops, but Nobody got it.

[End description.]

+more from the comments

(via romulus-felix)

bl1tzkr136fr1tz-62nd-attempt:

catchymemes:

(via paladin-official)

nkp1981:

(via gryphongirl)

digitaldiscipline:

thebibliosphere:

ikebanaka:

thebibliosphere:

thebibliosphere:

thebibliosphere:

Speaking of therapy, I say, as though we’re old friends, and you’re not a stranger trapped in this metaphorical elevator with me and you can hear the suspension wires starting to fray.

I’ve been doing a lot of work recently that’s focused on imposter syndrome and the feeling that no matter how well or how much I do, I’m not good enough. That I’m somehow tricking everyone into thinking my work is actually good.

Some days it’s a minor niggle in my head that I can gentle and soothe with logic and affirmations. Or smother, depending on the mood. Other times it’s loud and all-consuming and the mental anguish it causes me is so real I can feel it twitching in my muscles. This desperate fight-or-flight instinct with nowhere to go and nothing to fight but myself.

Anyway, because I’m several types of Mentally Unwell™, I was switching between workshop sheets ahead of next week. Filling in different forms. (Trying to get a good grade in therapy) And I got my “recognize your harmful ADHD coping mechanisms” worksheet mixed in with the “you’re not actually lying to people, you just feel like you are because your brain is full of weasels” worksheet, and seeing them side by side made something go topsy turvy in my head, and I just had to sit and breathe for a couple of minutes until the urge to scream passed. Because it clicked, it all suddenly clicked.

The reason the imposter syndrome workshops and therapy sessions aren’t sticking was because I do routinely trick people into thinking I’m someone I’m not.

Because I’m masking my ADHD for their convenience.

I’ve always known there was something wrong with me. My neurotypical peers made it abundantly clear I didn’t fit in or was failing in some way I couldn’t see nor remedy, no matter how hard I tried.

So I compressed myself into a workaholic box of hyper-competence in the hopes they’d stop noticing the flaws and exploit like me instead. And then subsequently lived with the daily fear that if they looked too close, they’d realize I’m a monumental fuck up with enough personal baggage to block the Suez Canal.

If you ever need someone to burn themselves to ashes for your comfort and convenience, I’m your gal.

Or I used to. Until I had a bit of a breakdown, and the rubber band holding my brain together snapped and pinged off into the stratosphere, never to be seen again.

Unfortunately, the trauma of living like that didn’t also fuck off and instead left a gaping maw where my personality ought to be, so now I get to deal with that aftermath.

And it’s that aftermath that’s affecting the imposter syndrome shit. Because yes, I am hyper-competent and good at what I do– but it doesn’t feel real because that is how I mask.

And the truly frustrating thing is I am good at what I do. I am not pretending. I worked hard to be good at this. It just feels like I’m dicking around because 90% of my personality turns out to be trauma masquerading as humor in a trenchcoat, and having people genuinely like something weird I’m doing is so foreign my brain has decided it’s just another form of masking.

I’m pretending to be a good author so people will think I’m a good author, and my brain thinks we are in Danger of being found out. We are in Danger, and writing is Dangerous because then people will know I’m Weird and not whatever palatable version I’ve presented myself as for their NT sensibilities.

Like the neurotic vampire with a raging praise kink wasn’t an obvious giveaway.

Anyway. I got nothing else. Thanks for listening.

I’m going to go be very normal in another room and not stare into the abyss of my own soul for a bit.

I brought this post up with my ADHD therapist today (who also has ADHD), and she got so still that I thought our Zoom call had frozen.

Turns out she just needed to stare into her soul for a bit and it looked like this:

Every so often, I see notes from this post go past in my activity feed, and the tags really do look like a mass of people screaming as the suspension wires holding up the metaphorical elevator snap and we all plunge into the abyss.

Sorry/happy to have helped rip the bandaid off that coping mechanism for you. Hope it wasn’t too load-bearing…

Anyway. I’m starting EMDR trauma therapy for this soon because I haven’t been able to gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss DBT my way out of this one, so, y'know, really puts the trauma of masking in perspective when you have to resort to the same desensitization and reprocessing therapy you use to cope with the cPTSD from literally almost dying.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Unrelated but ADHD flavored note, where the hell did you get such a crystal clear image of Lisa staring at the table??? I can only find versions that look like they got converted to pdf or some shit

r/memeresotration.

The image looks grainy on the google search but when you click on it, it clarifies.

much like this post

hamletthedane:

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

(via chibisketches)

coindolls:

thinking about naming her Morganite🤍💖🫶✨

(via girlsofmanylands)

gryphonablaze:

alexander-smart:

thisthinginabox:

writing-prompt-s:

Why did you give the last of your food to that poorly disguised mimic? You were finally at peace with letting go, but now this odd thing won’t leave you alone and is even turning itself into various items in an attempt to aid you.

The mimic is a young one, and you knew that from the moment you laid eyes on it. It was disguised as a crate, but the angles weren’t quite right. The corners were a little lopsided, and if you looked hard enough you could make out the creature’s mouth.

A sigh escapes you as you toss over the last of your rations, not even bothering to stand up as you do so. What’s the point? You think. I’ve been trapped in this cave for days, nobody is looking for me, and the monsters are closing in. Why should I bother even trying? I could just fall asleep now, and let this little mimic eat me too.

The thing is… it doesn’t. It eats your rations, but when you lay down and try to sleep, it doesn’t attack. You do hear it move closer, but you don’t open your eyes until you feel something nudge your hand. As you barely open your eyes, you can see that the mimic has morphed itself into a crude sword. You can’t help but chuckle.

“You’re cute, but I don’t have anything left to give you.” You don’t have anything left to give for yourself either, but you don’t say so.

The mimic doesn’t seem to take no for an answer. It becomes a dagger, then an axe, then a staff, as though it’s trying to determine what your preffered weapon is.

“Listen, I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but it’s not working. I’m not going to pick you up and take you into some other part of this stupid cave system. Nice try, though.”

You turn away from it and attempt to sleep again. As you do so, you find yourself shivering. You really wish, as you doze off, that you had a blanket.

When you wake, much later, you’re surprised to find yourself covered with the warmest blanket you’ve ever had. You quickly sit up, eagerly hoping that someone had cone for you, but the cave is empty. When you look at the blanket, you notice the imperfect edges and the janky seam across the middle.

“…why haven’t you eaten me yet?” You ask the little mimic that’s now laying on top of you. “What’s wrong with you?”

The mimic, still in the form of the blanket, slithers off of you, but it does not respond. Instead, it begins taking the form of weapons again. When it turns into a crooked staff, you reach out, despite yourself. Your fingers wrap around it and you use it to haul your aching, injured body to your feet. “I guess there are probably nicer places to die.”

You know you won’t get far. And you don’t. Especially not without light. The mimic doesn’t seem too bothered, though. When you collapse again, it scuttles off. Perhaps this was simply where it wanted you to take it. Perhaps now you can finally succumb to your exhaustion.

Then, a few minutes later, a misshapen clay cup bumps against your hand. It’s full of water, and there’s a crack in the middle like a jagged mouth. You pick up the cup and you drink, telling yourself it’s only out of desperation. When you set the cup down, that little cracked mouth seems to smile.

This goes on for what feels like days. The mimic helps you limp along through the tunnels, transforming into whatever you may need at any given time. Every time you fall asleep, you expect not to wake up. Yet, you do, usually with a mimic blanket wrapped around you. It brings you food and water when you can.

The biggest surprise comes when one morning, you find you’re pleased to have survived another night. You’re happy to have the mimic keeping you warm. It’s a new feeling, and a confusing one, but it’s not unpleasant.

The other monsters that you know are down here seem to leave you alone for the most part. You aren’t sure why. It crosses your mind that maybe it has something to do with the mimic. Then again, maybe they’re just waiting for you to die. Death is gradually beginning to sound less and less appealing.

The day you catch a glimpse of sunlight down a long and narrow tunnel is the first day you finally feel like your old self again. Your pace quickens, and you don’t need to lean on the mimic’s staff form quite so much. The illusion shatters when you reach the light’s source. A small gap, high above. You curl up on the floor and cry. When you finally have the strength to look up again, your mimic has become a ladder.

Getting up is hard, in your state. Climbing, even more so. But the ladder is the biggest and best transformation the mimic has done so far, and if it wants you to get out, then you can’t let it down.

You feel it push up under you when you reach the gap. It helps you squeeze through, and then… freedom. Fresh air, and sunlight. You lay on your back on the stone, and you pass out.

You wake up at sunset, with a blanket draoed over you. A blanket with a jagged seam down the middle.

Danger. Fear. hide. Become rock. wait… calm. Hungry. find food. Smell food. See light. Dying fire.. Adventurer! Danger! Become box! Imperfect. Noticed. FearFearHumanRaisedHandFearThrowingBracing….

Not hurt. Human sigh. Near food. Danger? Prey?

Gift?

Eat. Filling.

Near human. Human resting. Danger? Observe.

ApproachFearFearFear. Observe. Become sword. Wait.

Nudgefearfearfear. Human sound. Imperfect? Become knife. No? Imperfect. Become axe. No? Imperfect. Become staff. Human sound. Human sound. Human turn. Imperfect?

Wait. Observe.

Human resting…. Human shaking. Puzzle. Human scared? No? Imperfect. Human cold? What do? Fear. Become fire.PainNO. pain. Imperfect. Human shake less. Human cold. Puzzle. Recover. Ideafear. Become blanket. Fear. Touchfearfear.

Touch.

Cover. Warm. Rest.

AwakeMovingFear! Fear! human. Human noise. Retreat. Imperfect.

Observe. Not danger.

Become sword? No? Imperfect. Become weapon? No? Imperfect. Become tool? Become warhammer. No? Imperfect. Human weak. Become small knife. No? Imperfect. Become walking stick. Human reaches. Brace. Touched.

Support. Move.

Human tired. Human injured? Imperfect. No blood. No angles. Darkness? Bad Idea NONONO. Human dry? Unknown. Human stop. Human collapse! Observe. Human in safety. Fix human dry.

Observe. Smell water. Distant. Follow.

Danger. Direwolf in water. Puzzle. Observe. Have height. Idea.

Become stone. Tumble. Pain. Imperfect. Direwolf flee. Perfect enough.

Pause. Recover. Observe. Become bucket. Fill. Climb back up. Spill some. Imperfect. At top. Some water. Perfect enough. Return.

Not back. Smell Direwolf. Fear. Have water. Caution. Observe. Crevice. Pour. Direwolf sound! Fear! Spill! Imperfect! Fear! Become stone! Direwolf approach! Become hard. Direwolf approach water! BadBadBad! Become Problem! Surprise! Bite nose! Bite! Direwolf sound. Direwolf leave. Calm.

Obtain water? Become bucket. No. Imperfect. Large. Become cup. Some water. Perfect enough. Careful. Return.

Brace. Human lift. Human drink. Human resting. Become blanket. Warm.

Time.

Split path. Human confused. Smell. Stagnant. Fresh? Follow fresh. Lead human. Support.

Time.

Smell prey. Hungry. Shake. Human sit. Quiet. Find prey. Split. Support human. Return. Human resting. Feed. Become blanket. Warm.

Time.

Light! Exit! Rush! Approach. Observe. Puzzle. Height. Hole in roof. Problem. Human noise. Human collapse! Human turn. Human noise… problem. problem. problem.

Puzzle? Puzzle. Observe. Climb wall. Difficult. Impossible? No. Approach roof. Reach hole. Puzzle. Observe. Human mimic mimic? Imperfect. Become rope? Imperfect. Human weak. Become staircase? Imperfect. Size.

Puzzle. Puzzle. …Create? Become StaircaseRope? Become… StaircaseRope. Imperfect. Shift. Shift. Puzzle. Shift. Become StaircaseRope.

Human turn. Human pause. Human rise. Human approach. Support human. Human climb. Imperfect. Perfect enough. Human rise. Human pause. Human noise. Human climb.

Human reach surface!

Become blanket. Cover human. Become… friend?

Dude this is an awesome addition. That the mimic thinks so much in terms of ‘perfect/imperfect.’ It makes total sense for something whose schtick is mimicking things as accurately as possible. But the first time it said ‘perfect enough’ was a gut punch at my own perfectionism. So ow

(via prismatic-bell)

neonbuck:

neonbuck:

neonbuck:

“No one wants to look at art of OCs” I don’t think that’s true at all…I follow people specifically to see their OCs literally all the time. Bring back being curious about people’s OCs, asking questions about them and hyping them up like we did when we were teens

my plan worked…ive tricked you all into doing some thing nice for your friends or mutuals….huzzah >:3

Originally posted by just-some-friendly-fun

the point of this post: would you like to live in a world where it’s common to pay attention to artists’ original characters and original work?

that starts with you ! community is give and take, not just “take”. compliment and ask questions about your friends’/favorite artists’ OCs today !

(via tiredspacedragon)

cryptic-queer-cryptid:

jonathan sims top character of all time. his best friend is his ex-girlfriend’s cat. he doesn’t drink coffee. he lies about his age but everyone believes him because he acts like a 60 year old man. the second he’s faced with death he asks his coworker if he’s a ghost. he later falls in love with that coworker. instead of having a beautiful narrative arc about the importance of friendship and surrounding yourself with anchors he had a meat freak rip out his rib. he’s canonly asexual.

(via livebloggingmydescentintomadness)

orpheuslament:

Ritual Is Journey, Chris Abani

(via wearepaladin)