i no longer exist

Hell, I was 'helping mommy/daddy cook' by cracking eggs and stirring things and flattening dough balls etc at the age of Three.

If your parents didn't begin teaching you these skills as soon as you had the gross motor functions to perform them, they were being negligent.

Greebil doesn't how to swipe and punch in 111 on android. And if he did, he doesn't know to ask for an ambulance and doesn't know his R D number since Greebil lives on a lifestyle block in Methven.

Greebil's parents are away for the week and Grandpa was in good health when he collapsed. They don't intend to call until they get to Singapore - a 10ish hour flight.

Greebil's gradpa is very still. Not talking. But he's warm and breathing. Greebil knows because he's cuddled up next to him.

He can't go to the neighbours. Strangers are scary and at the house nearest, the mum is very smiley and nice but used to have a yelly boyfriend and her house is a bit run down. Boyo and Girlsta who also live there used to be Greebil's friends until the yelly boyfriend but now Greebil's mum says he can't play there anymore because strangers are scary and can't be trusted.

The yelly boyfriend was gone before Greebil was even six but he's still not allowed to go over there or play with Girlsta and Boyo.

Greebil doesn't know any of his other neighbours.

It's been a lot of hours now. Grandpa is still warm but Greebil is hungry. There were biscuits in the pantry but they're all gone apart from the crumbs near Grandpa where Greebil had tried to feed him.

The stove is too dangerous. The knives are too dangerous. The kettle is too dangerous. The cereal is too high because Greebil has gotten into it before when he shouldn't have and Greebil has been told not to stand on chairs. Too dangerous.

Greebil has seen his mum put 2-minute noodles in the microwave though. He's not used the microwave before, but he tries. He opens a packet and puts it in a bowl and puts it in the microwave. He pushes 2 and start but the microwave dings really quickly so he looks at the packet and there is a picture. He puts in 2 0 0 and hits start.

It goes for longer this time but starts to smell weird. It dings and Greebil take it out but the bowl is hot and it burns. He drops the bowl and the noddles fall on the ground. They don't look like mum's noodles. They're still hard and black on top.

Greebil looks at the packet again and sees another picture of a kettle pouring steamy water. But the kettle is too dangerous.

Grandpa isn't breathing now. He's getting cold. Greebil puts a blanket over him and stares, not knowing what to do.

He finds some porridge oats and eats those raw. They don't have milk. They were going to get some when Grandpa collapsed.

Greebil hopes everything will be okay. He's done his best but he's scared and alone and hasn't been equipped to help himself or others.

He lies beside Grandpa and snuggles in. He takes Grandpa's arm and has it hug him.

Grandpa is even colder now.

We are investigating reports of errors when trying to load AO3, including errors saying that AO3 is down, which seem to be related to the previous incident. We will update when we have more information!

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black hair? check. bad parent(s)? check. trauma? double check.

bruce: how’d you get your scar?

zuko: my dad got mad at me for saying that killing people is wrong so he lit my face on fire and banished me.

J: "wan na kno w h ow i go t thes e sc ar s"

Consider

Iroh: you too must learn patience. Boiling the water ruins the delicate flavor of the white jade

Alfred: oh I'm dreadfully sorry - for some reason I expected this tea to have TEA in it

(later)

Alfred: *aggressively laying out full tea service with milk, lemon, sugar, and, just to drive his point in, jam*

while Zuko is enthusiastic about cream and sugar

My favorite detail, though, is his performance of Pure Imagination. On the surface, the song is charming and inviting, but if you look closely at him throughout the scene, you'll notice that Gene never blinks. He looks around, down at his feet, up at the trees; his eyes never fully close. He moves erratically, stuttering up and down the steps of the chocolate room. The lyrics are warm and friendly, but his face is blank. He bows to permit his visitors to run amok, but his posture is stiff. He helps Violet and Mike reach a couple of treats, but there is no joy in the gesture. The final post-chorus feels like a dirge, a threat, and a warning, all at once; Wonka sits in repose under a tree, but his eyes are glassy and dispassionate. "There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination; / living there / you'll be free / if you truly / wish / to be.......... "

i think the fact that i can say over and over again 'i am not being ironic, this is not a bit, my books are not a joke' and have people on the right AND left just say 'NO YOU ARE' to my face (or my mask) over and over again is very telling. culture just cannot deal with neurodivergent people yet

i am very thankful i have the confidence to weather decades of people calling my work ‘shit posts’ or ‘intentionally bad’. i think it has personally made me very strong and confident in my art, but it is fascinating how hard it is for some folks to even CONCEIVE of someone this different than them

most creators have these BIG DREAMS and goals, like winning an oscar or traditionally publishing a book: my dream is to live in a world where the average person has a relationship with joy and sincerity and sexuality and fantasy that makes my books seem not outrageous at all. which is how i see them

i know buds mean well when they post stuff like ‘i cant believe chuck tingle went from erotica to traditional bestseller lists’ and thats FINE. i take it in the kind way it is intended. at same time, i want to live in a world where fantastical sexuality in art is not seen as a gutter to emerge from

Katie is thrilled to score tickets for the USA men’s hockey finals, but after a strange turn of events, she’s even more excited to find herself up close and personal with the team’s T-Rex star player, Flonto Breem.

The two set off on a first date, and things are going well, until questions about Flonto’s political affiliation start bubbling to the surface. It’s not long before Katie realizes that all the goodwill she’d felt for this dinosaur hockey player was misinformed, and that Flonto is a full on MAGA dork.

Looks like there won’t be any pounding tonight! Unless, of course, the USA women’s team and their star triceratops are somewhere nearby!

This tale is 4,100 words of sexless disappointment that the T-Rex you thought was cool is actually an authoritarian bootlicker.

----

Red flags: Unbelievable nature you've never seen before!, no external source cited, low image quality could be hiding AI artifacts, lacks scientific name for plant, OP is an aesthetic blog (no offense, I see you credit most of the artists you post, OP <3).

Green flags: Common name of the tree provided (although the leaves don't look like any olive tree I've ever seen).

Reverse image searches and citation trails all seem to lead back to now-deleted Reddit posts. Google Images says it's this one in r/NatureIsFuckingLit, and TinEye says it's this one in r/interestingasfuck. Both were posted back in 2020. This is important because the rise of AI images was in 2022.

People in the comments of places this image is posted throw around botanical terms like "dichotomous branching" [branches split into two at the nodes] and "divaricated" [branches grow far apart from each other], which are cool, but don't tell me what the tree is.

Searching up "Black Olive" on iNaturalist finally got me some answers, and it turns out that YES. This is a real tree! This tree is a Dwarf Black Olive (Terminalia molinetii, Formerly Bucida spinosa). The above photos are some particularly nicely framed shots of a tree with particularly small leaves, which really highlights the branching structure. I really wish we knew the photographer's name. Here are some more photos of the same species:

Terminalia molinetii by jriveracruz50 on iNaturalist, posted under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

This tree is native to Southern Mexico, Belize, the southern tip of Florida, and Cuba. Dwarf Black Olives are completely unrelated to Olive trees in the Olea genus that I'm more familiar with (the former is in Order Myrtales [Myrtles, Evening Primroses, and Allies], and the latter is in Order Lamiales [Mints, Plantains, Olives, and Allies]).

I showed this post to my boyfriend and he tried to take his shirt off like a girl and 

uh

and it made me realize that girls and boys pull their shirt off differently. /amazed

Its not science unless you write it down so 

Well done, i guess…

Second:

I fucked up

It’s all in the way that girl/boys shirts are made.

Girls shirts have less armpit room then boy’s do and are generally shorter so pulling it off over your head is more practical because by lifting your arms all the way up you make enough room for the sleeves to just slip off.

Boys shirts have more room and are generally longer so it is easy to slip them off over your head.

but if you take a girls shirt off like a boys shirt you will get your arms caught because there isn’t much armpit space.

and if you take a boys shirt off like a girls shit you will still have your head in it when you’ve lifted your arms all the way up because of the shirt’s length.

The number one rejected damage issue we had was guys pulling their shirts, polos, t-shirts over their head like this.

It strains the tight seam about the collar and any seams along the shoulders causing them to rip.

Women also had vocations and forms of income unrelated to their husband. The nature of these jobs changed over time but many women did things like weaving, embroidery, crafting, beer brewing, chicken tending and laundress work to bring income. Women with skills were seen as better marriage candidates because they’d make money for their husband.

My great-great-great-great grandmother told fortunes and did farm labor, my great-great-great grandmother was a midwife, my great-great grandmother worked in a textile factory for most of her adult life and my great grandmother was a school lunch lady.

What I think needs a little more spelling out as well is the way that historically, what we grammatically speak of as being the man's occupation was often in fact the entire family's occupation, with which parts of the necessary work each person did conventionally divided up along gender lines.

Just some random examples (the gender splits here are pretty typical but I can't say they're true of all cultures; I'm primarily familiar with western European history and especially the British Isles):

men fishing, women preparing the fish for sale and selling them at a market ("fishwives")

wives as salespeople and managers of the financial side of the business was also common for many male-coded artisan crafts; the man who is the 'silversmith' is actually smithing the silver (possibly with the aid of sons, apprentices and/or hired labourers), while his wife is taking care of everything else that is necessary for this to translate into a money-making business

husbands underground mining coal with a focus on speed over purity of product, children transporting it to the surface so he doesn't have to leave, and wives sorting the coal from the worthless rock on the surface. The entire family contributes to the pay check, which is based on the amount of sorted coal delivered.

wives as writers, editors, secretaries and research partners to male academics, scholars and politicians - also frequently doing much of the work associated with the networking that was neccessary for success in these careers. (It was not uncommon in some periods for wives to handle a lot of their husbands' correspondence, and of course a lot more socialising used to involve being hosted at peoples' homes. Wives of the relevant social classes for these careers were unlikely to be handling e.g. the cooking themselves - their job here is more like event manager and line manager of the staff doing the work.)

servants who were married were typically married to servants in the same household (and servant occupations were highly gendered)

"farmer's wife" and "baker's wife" and so on are properly understood as occupations, traditionally taking on parts of the work that a modern baker would need to hire someone for

After a time, women were no longer allowed to work underground, but being a miner's wife was backbreaking exhausting labour, and a great many women not only got the same health issues from handling and washing the coal dust-impregnated clothing of their husbands, but also got serious medical emergencies such as burns and scalds from the constant water heating for baths, pregnancy complications, etc.