Your purpose in life is not to love yourself but to love beingyourself.
If you goal is to love yourself, then your focus is directed inward toward yourself, and you end up constantly watching yourself from the outside, disconnected, trying to summon the “correct” feelings towards yourself or fashion yourself into something you can approve of.
If your goal is to love being yourself, then your focus is directed outward towards life, on living and making decisions based on what brings you pleasure and fulfillment.
Be the subject, not the object. It doesn’t matter what you think of yourself. You are experiencing life. Life is not experiencing you.
Thank you this is the first post about self love that hasn’t made me want to throw things
I think it’s kind of funny how common a trope hive minds are in science fiction like we’re all super fascinated by the concept of a linked species that shares data through psychic link or whatever. But when it comes down to it it’s just as likely that an alien might see us and consider us to be a linked species because we are constantly connected and we share data through vibrations in the air or in codes that are just manipulating a space so different frequencies of light can be observed against each other or in an elaborate system of movement. And we are basically always doing this and none of our complex thoughts show up on their own they are built upon by others and every piece of ourselves is influenced by the networks of other humans that share data with us. Like sure we CAN exist as an individual unit but you die if you haven’t spent years getting data that teaches you how to survive like none of us can just LEAVE the hive mind right away and we only thrive when part of a communal unit. Idk maybe this is nothing but I think it’s kind of cool.
A human would get trapped on an alien world and ask for help getting back to earth and the alien would go “oh no! This species becomes both psychologically and physically unwell if not networked to other members of its species! Don’t worry little guy I’ll get you back to your monkey hive mind”
i believe that settled humans behave more like hive insects than we do like primates, even our closest cousins.
we collect food and bring it back to a central protected area to share with non-gatherers. we specialize into castes and roles. we cooperate to build grand structures to live in together and to defend from rival hives. we tend to have specific places equipped with specialized caretakers to raise and educate our young as a collective. our constructions get increasingly geometric and regimented the bigger our hive becomes. we often use other species in the maintenance and defence of our home. and we develop ways to leave messages to each other: not just signalling directly about current situations, but marking paths, posting warnings, and indicating work to be done in the future.
other primates don’t do any of this. none of them. not even chimps, our closest cousins in the world.
but hive insects do.
settled humans area hive species. that’s why we invent communication technology, and also why we so readily adopt it. language, messengers, roads, signal towers, writing, mail, printing presses, newspapers, telegrams, radio, phones, the internet. each time the hive gets that much better at operating like a hive instead of a troop. we’re running bee software on monkey hardware, and it’s working really well.
god i am SO excited for dwarf fortress steam…… the accessibility they’re adding to it sounds fucking WILD for what dwarf fortress is and has been for the past like. what? 14 years? its gonna have mouse controls, and actual user interface, ACTUAL ART like gosh it was totally unimaginable that dwarf fortress would ever have this stuff a few years back and here we are
this honestly might be the biggest game changer since they added the z-axis
i am getting somewhat suspicious of this count dracula. jonathan wrote that he is behaving kinda oddly, and that he is talking as if he’d been there for all of those historic battles centuries ago
what really tipped me off though is that he calls himself “a dracula”, which, yes, could just be referring to a person belonging to house dracula, but dracula is also the romanian word for dragon, and according to some legends dragons can take the shape of a human at will
so currently i’m thinking that our friend jonathan harker might have been imprisoned by a dragon
we have not heard from our friend jonathan in three days, so now i am starting to worry that he has been eaten by the dragon
we have heard from johnny! he has not been eaten by the dragon yet!
however, dracula has been described as moving “just as a lizard moves”, so this is further proof of my theory
“SecUnit—” Arada started at the same time as Ratthi said, “I don’t think—”
ART interrupted, SecUnit’s earlier statement that I “lie a lot” was untrue. I obviously cannot reveal information against the interests of my crew unless circumstances warrant.
Arada nodded. “Right. We understand. I think SecUnit is looking out for our interests—”
i’ve been wanting to draw this scene since i first read ne and finally got around to it HSDJKS
She was born to a rich plantation family in the American South during the time of slavery. She owned a slave, Hetty, a girl her parents gave her when she was a child. She was absolutely the sort of person whose racism you could justify as being ‘of her time’ and ‘just the way she was raised’.
And she cited the injustices she saw growing up on the plantation as the motivation for her becoming an abolitionist as an adult.
When she was a kid, she tried to give bible lessons to the slaves on her Dad’s plantation, and taught her own slave to read and write. As an adult, she and her sister campaigned for the end of slavery. When she found out that one of her brothers had raped one of his own slaves and gotten her pregnant three times, she welcomed her nephews into the family and paid for education for the two that wanted it.
This was a woman who was raised in a culture of slavery, looked around her as a child and said “hey, wait a minute, we’re all assholes!” and spent the rest of her life trying to put things right.
It absolutely was a choice.
This is something I’ve been forced to learn in the past two years. The world around me is turning into something I was raised to believe could only happen in history books, or maybe in other parts of the world that sort of belonged in history books.
The more I see this happening–and the more I learn about the past and how hard people did fight to stop Hitler from initially rising to power, or to point out the humanity of slaves–the more apparent it becomes that we have always had these choices, and they’ve always been the same.
And we’re always going to have genuinely appealing opportunities to make the worst possible choices again, no matter how much more modern the world appears.
George Washington owned slaves right? Most of the founding fathers did, and in grade school, to smooth over that abuse of humanity by an American hero, we as children were told “Yes, George Washington did own slaves but he freed them when he died.” And you infer that he didn’t like slavery but it was an economic necessity.
And then you’re in your mid twenties watching a food show on Netflix and you learn that because Pennsylvania was a Quaker colony, they led the nation in emancipation and if an enslaved person was in Philadelphia for more than six months, they automatically became freed. And the young nation’s early capital was in Philadelphia, where Washington brought his household of enslaved people with him. And he took them back to Virginia every five months for a time so as to start that clock over and keep them enslaved.
There’s a trend with historians to want so badly to maintain the prestige of George Washington and an exceptional and morally pristine figure. And true, there are many instances in his writing where he sounds like his opinion on slavery as an institution is turning and that he knew slavery was wrong. But his actions. He literally had to do absolutely nothing to free his household staff, and took great pains to keep them enslaved.
It’s important to remember that too. That there were people in positions of enormous power, who know what they’re doing is wrong, and choose to do it anyway.
Do not let anyone tell you his teeth were made of wood.
there are documented cases–journals and diaries–of women who would marry into slave-owning households. and they would start out wanting to treat their slaves well, educate them, free them if they could. they kept diaries, records, logs, account books. and over the years their opinion of the people they owned would change. they’d start to say that slaves deserved their enslavement and nothing could be done. they couldn’t be educated, healed, freed. sometimes the women who married in would end up incredibly cruel and vengeful, raving about how much punishment these slaves forcedtheir masters to dole out. these women who started out uncomfortable with slavery but just willing enough to marry a slave owner and live on the proceeds of slavery would end up zealously denying any possibility that their slaves could be human beings, just to be able to live with their own complicity in the system. to be able to hang on to the idea that they were a good person, that nothing could be done, that no one could change any of it.
sometimes you make bad choices. and you cant stand the idea that this could make you a bad person. so you decidethat the people you’ve hurt are the bad ones. and you can’t find a way back so you just keep making more and more bad choices, picking up speed, gaining this horrible kind of momentum, because to ever stop would crush you flat.
but it doesn’t change the fact that slave owners were wrong. they did wrong. and they had to spend their whole lives deciding, over and over again, not to do what was right.
Batman literally has plans for defeating every Justice League member if they go rogue (except for Wonder Woman because she’s just that awesome and terrifying).
what does batman have to do wth bruce wayne?
Well, since it’s Tony Stark vs Bruce Wayne, that means that they are not fighting as superheroes. And let’s be honest, Tony doesn’t have a lot of hand-to-hand combat experience and Bruce is built like a house.
Tony is missing ribs ok, probably some lung capacity. If he’d still got the reactor he’d be double fucked. Bruce would go straight for the chest.
Not to mention that Bruce is a guy who fights with his body. Not a mech.
tony stark could easily beat up local beefy himbo philanthropist…and then promptly get his metal ass crushed like a soda can by batman before he reached city limits. everyone knows that bruce wayne’s secret boyfriend doesn’t fuck around with his sugar daddy’s health and safety.
The eyes-in-the-front thing (usually) only applies to mammals. Crocodiles, arguably the inspiration for dragons, have eyes that look to the sides despite being a predator.
hey what up I’m about to be That Asshole
This isn’t a mammalian thing. When people talk about ‘eyes on the front’ or ‘eyes on the side,’ they’re really talking about binocular vision vs monocular vision. Binocular vision is more advantageous for predators because it’s what gives you depth perception; i.e, the distance you need to leap, lunge, or swipe to take out the fast-moving thing in front of you. Any animal that can position its eyes in a way that it has overlapping fields of vision has binocular vision. That includes a lot of predatory reptiles, including komodo dragons, monitor lizards, and chameleons.
(The eyes-in-front = predator / eyes-on-sides = prey thing holds true far more regularly for birds than it does for mammals. Consider owls, hawks, and falcons vs parrots, sparrows, and doves.)
But it’s not like binocular vision is inherently “better” than monocular vision. It’s a trade-off: you get better at leap-strike-kill, but your field of vision is commensurately restricted, meaning you see less stuff. Sometimes, the evolutionary benefit of binocular vision just doesn’t outweigh the benefit of seeing the other guy coming. Very few forms of aquatic life have binocular vision unless they have eye stalks, predator or not, because if you live underwater, the threat could be coming from literally any direction, so you want as wide a field of view as you can get. If you see a predator working monocular vision, it’s a pretty safe assumption that there is something else out there dangerous enough that their survival is aided more by knowing where it is than reliably getting food inside their mouths.
For example, if you are a crocodile, there is a decent chance that a hippo will cruise up your shit and bite you in half. I’d say that makes monocular vision worthwhile.
Which brings us back to OP’s point. Why would dragon evolution favor field of view over depth perception?
A lot of the stories I’ve read painted the biggest threats to dragons (until knights with little shiny sticks came along) as other dragons. Dragons fight each other, dragons have wars. And like fish, a dragon would need to worry about another dragon coming in from any angle. That’s a major point in favor of monocular vision. Moreover, you don’t need depth perception in order to hunt if you can breathe fucking fire. A flamethrower is not a precision weapon. If you can torch everything in front of you, who cares if your prey is 5 feet away or 20? Burn it all and sift among the rubble for meat once everything stops moving.
Really, why would dragons have eyes on the front of their heads? Seems like they’ve got the right idea to me.
Worthwhile cryptozoological discourse
i want to point out also that crocodiles live in water, which has much more perceptible currents than air does. the crocodile snout is sensitive! some sources say it’s as sensitive as a human fingertip. so they can have a really broad field of vision to scan around, and to gather a maximum amount of data on stuff abovethe water, while their sensitive snout is still below the water, feeling for the turbulence patterns of other swimming creatures. they employ both together.
they don’t need binocular vision to judge how close their prey might be. they have that big enormous triangular snout in front of them to feelit.
tldr; dragons have plenty of good reasons to have monocular fields of vision, possibly including sensitive snoots.
i love pitting classically trained magic users against self-taught magic users in sci-fi/fantasy but it shouldn’t be snobbish disdain for them it should be terror
“WHO TAUGHT YOU LIGHTNING BEFORE BASIC TELEKINESIS. LOSING MY MIND WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU JUST DID IT. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAST WITH YOUR BARE HANDS”
i feel like the infantilisation of autistic people in the eyes of science and psychology really stunts them when it comes to talking about some of the issues that come from being autistic in a world built for nt people. like i dont think ive ever seen substance abuse rates discussed wrt autistics because thats an “adult problem” and the public at large has an image of autistic adults as overgrown kids, despite the fact that almost every other autistic adult ive met has had a history of substance abuse issues at least partly in response to the stress of existing in the world as an autistic person. like if youre constantly beset on all sides by stress and sensory overload of course youre going to gravitate towards drugs and alcohol and things that smooth over those sharp edges, make socialising easier, etc…
I think that the absolute worst thing, hands down, about long distance relationships, platonic or otherwise, is when your friend feels bad and you can’t just be like “I’ll be there in 20 with a pizza and a shoulder to cry on”
by special request of ourlolitadaydreams, a larger version of that hold my flower doodle
BUt yall don’t understand how perfect this is.
Cause, it’s generally agreed: Hades was a pretty chill dude. He was rich and powerful and grim and kind of a moody manic sometimes, but generally, as long as you stayed on your side of the styx and didn’t much up with him he was content to leave you be. And even if you come crashing down into his realm being a jackass, he was still fair and just, if annoyed. (The story where Heracles bails out one of the guys he had punished for being rude psycho jackasses basically amounts to “leave the lead jackass to rot, but if it means that much take the other brats”)
He’s a very Lawful Neutral figure: The guy behind the desk of the great tax collector in the ancient world. The Greeks had a healthy respect and fear for him, but as long as you followed the rules and paid the ferry man there wasn’t anything to fear- and really he wasn’t the one responsible for the system…Just the guy enforcing it.
But Persephone.
Persephone.
There was someone you didn’t not want to piss off. There is a reason Hades name is just “The Rich One” and her’s is “The Iron Queen”. She took her job as queen of the underworld very very seriously and she had a mean streak a mile wide. When Orpheus came down to fetch his wife Hades was all for letting them go he was so moved by the man’s music, but Persephone is the one that set the trial knowing that Orpheus couldn’t resist looking- in some versions of the myth after he’s ripped apart by nymphs she seats him in their court to be their musician and it’s implied that was her plan all along- to not only keep one soul but to gain another- capable of great music to please her husband. When the whole thing with Adonis went down, she threatened the stability of all the world to tip the scales in her favor. According to Homer when men wanted to call curses down on the souls of the departed they invoked her name.
The Greeks where terrified of her. Aside from her priests no one was allowed to speak her name legally (with Hades and the others it was just social tabbo) for fear of drawing her attention. To them- she was the Goddess of Life AND Death, Summer and Winter. She command power over men’s lives and their deaths. You did not mess with her.
In all likely hood this is exactly how it would go down- Hades holding her flower while she meeted out the divine hellish punishment on the offenders.
