my dad has this crazy ass huge camera lens so we went out during the eclipse last night and got maybe one of my favorite photos i’ve ever had a hand in taking
you cant do that here
How short are people's memories for them to forget that Airbnb, streaming, Uber used to all be cheap
Mobile services used to also be cheap.
this isn't some new invention of amazon and silicon valley, by the way, it's just how the capitalist market operates. supermarkets originally undercut local groceries in the same way, because they had more weight to throw around, and could take a loss in one spot that was made up in another. it's a general tendency towards monopolisation.
This is how Walmart literally destroyed hundreds and hundreds of small towns.
If you’ve never been all that disobedient before, you can and should start really, really small. For example, you can wear the slightly revealing or gloriously trashy-looking garment that makes your mom roll her eyes and sigh despondently every time she sees you put it on. You will feel judged and disapproved of when you put it on, but that is fine. Your goal is to sit with the uncomfortable feelings and continue with your desired behavior anyway. Saunter down the steps in that highlighter-yellow Garfield crop top with your chest hair flowing over the neckline, and harness as much courage as you can muster. It’s okay if you feel like a beacon of sin. Just keep it moving. Your emotions are not the target here. Your behavior is. You can feel however you are feeling in the moment so long as you keep acting like you’re free. Do you have a favorite TV show that a partner or roommate vocally hates? Try watching that show around them without apologizing or defensively joining them in mocking the program. At first, you probably won’t be able to enjoy the show while in their presence. You’ll feel self-conscious about everything they find annoying or cringe-inducing about the show, and so focused on their reactions that you can’t relax. That’s okay. Allow those feelings of embarrassment and guilt to exist and pass through you without giving up. In time, you will be able to ignore these reactions more, and enjoy the activity. You want to see the needle of discomfort moving down just a little, like Link’s body temperature meter in Tears of the Kingdom when he puts on a breathable outfit in a hot climate. You’re not gonna go from roiling hot to frosty cold in an instant. But after a certain point, you won’t be actively in pain anymore. Things are just gonna slowly suck less, bit by bit, until they are finally okay. That’s true of most major life adjustments, I find. Probably the best way to develop self-advocacy skills while growing in your distress tolerance is simply by telling other people no. Do this without explanation or hedging. Nitpicky aunt wants to hear all about your dating life? “No, I don’t want to talk about that.” Unreliable ex-friend wants you to do them the tiny favor of moving their entire home gymnasium into a new third story walk-up? “No, I’m not available.” Manipulative shift supervisor wants to cajole you into sticking around for another three hours to close? “No.” As many advice columnists smarter than me have already intoned, “no” is a complete sentence. “No” requires no explanation. “No” is not subject to debate. “No” can be repeated over and over like a broken record if a disrespectful person acts like they can’t hear it. And you can walk away at any time to make your “no” physical and impossible to argue with, when someone has proven they don’t respect your boundaries.
Feeling unsafe is not the same thing as actually being under threat — and if we mask and people-please reflexively, we are likely treating many completely harmless situations of disagreement as if they were mortal threats. It’s important to learn to distinguish between a situation where you have no freedom to speak up, and one where you can live authentically as yourself, and simply get more comfortable with not pleasing everyone. So in any situation where you are free to, try saying “no” and riding out how scary it might feel. When you first say “no” without explanation or apology, you will feel anxiety. That’s okay. In fact, you should pat yourself on the back for reaching the borders of your comfort zone. It is in this area of unfamiliar, slightly scary, yet possible action that we are able to grow. You might panic the first time you tell your spouse you’re not cooking dinner every night anymore, and he’ll have to figure out the meal planning himself, or the first time you let a call from a manager go unanswered while you’re off the clock. Great! You are training your body to recognize that nothing bad happens when somebody is a little peeved at you. You’re detaching your sense of safety from another person’s feelings, and tearing apart that enmeshment hurts the way ripping off a band-aid does.
#this article made me finally understand what distress tolerance is and why it would make sense to train it#but i have absolutely no idea how to apply this to my own life#none of the examples would work for me#i don't even mask well anymore i just go on autopilot when asked questions like ''is an 8 am appointment ok'' and say yes 😭
My recommendation for you would be to slow down the process. If your instinct is to automatically say yes, just don't say anything for a second. It's okay if the moment feels awkward. It's not a weird thing to stop for a moment and think. You can even say "I need a moment to think about that." when someone throws you a question or recommends a course of action that you aren't sure how you feel about.
If those options fail, and you still reflexively say yes, you get to change your mind! You can call back and say "I need to change the time for an appointment." You can text your friend and say "Actually, I decided I don't want to see that slasher movie, sorry." You are allowed to speak up after the fact! That is just as legitimate! If you can't access your feelings in the heat of the moment, give yourself some time and space, and then do what you wanna do.
I agree!
“It’s important to learn to distinguish between a situation where you have no freedom to speak up, and one where you can live authentically as yourself, and simply get more comfortable with not pleasing everyone.”
This can be genuinely difficult, and it’s something I’m still trying to figure out. I ended up making two lists: one with my people-pleasing traits, and one with my authentic traits. Having behaviors written out helped me to decide which of my authentic traits can be considered personality quirks, and which ones I need to hide around family or at work. Turns out I still have some freedom to be myself, even in situations where I have no freedom to speak up.
required reading for autistic folks
not letting people rush you is a safety and security habit.
if your job is to guard a door, and somebody can get in your face and yell at you that they're too important to let you call in your supervisor to check because their records don't match up? Then you will let in somebody who isn't supposed to come in.
if somebody behind you on the road tailgating you and flashing their lights and swerving around can spook you into speeding up when you know it's not safe? Then you are likely to get into an accident.
rule number one of safety and security is: I am not in a hurry, and anyone trying to make me hurry up is suspect and I need to take my time even more carefully with them.
This line of thinking is also a great means & incentive to practice the skills of distress regulation and separating your own feelings from somebody elses. Person is stressed and frantic and yelling at me??? Okay. Thats their problem. I will focus on calming my own body down.
au where eggman is some egotistical unethical tech ceo that visits his local coffee shop everyday and harasses the customers and employees, but for some reason the owner is head-over-heels for him and keeps letting him get away with it
Deal
i too would trade my child for seven corn kernels
family
It’s so fascinating to me that we’ve only been breeding Komodo dragons in captivity for thirty years. In that time, our understanding of them has actually really revolutionized the way we understand the social lives and behaviors of lizards in general, and it’s mostly thanks to this lady right here, who was born 30 years ago on September 13, 1992.
Kraken was the first Komodo to be bred in captivity. She hatched out at GMU, but was raised at the National Zoo. Her parents were wild-caught dragons- there’s still WC dragons in the AZA today- and this one specific individual probably did more to revolutionize lizard care in professional settings than any other individual lizard throughout zoo history.
Until Kraken, social enrichment wasn’t a thing people thought about. It wasn’t something anybody felt was necessary for lizards, because they were just… lizards. Sure, some keepers would play with their favorites, but it wasn’t until the National Zoo started documenting what she was doing that anybody realized how much Komodo dragons like to play with us too.
Kraken’s not in that video, but she’s the one who inspired all of the social studies that have been done on captive Komodo dragons. When she was at the National Zoo, her keepers started getting curious when, for no apparent reason, she kept gingerly stealing things from peoples’ pockets and tugging on their shoelaces. So they started giving her stuff- Frisbees, blankets, soda cans, anything she showed an interest in.
She played with them, just like a mammal might. The way play behavior is described in psychology is a given activity that’s voluntary, repeated, and conducted under “relatively benign” circumstances. Keeper staff found that her conduct during the study met all of these criteria. “Kraken,” they wrote, had clearly demonstrated “play-like behavior with objects and even with humans (tug-of-war).” Moreover, she “could discriminate between prey and nonprey” while showing “varying responses” with different items (rubber rings, shoes, etc.). (There’s an excellent book on Komodo dragons that has an entire chapter devoted to her.)
Kraken died several years ago, but her legacy continues today. There’s several of her descendants still in the AZA, and the intelligence and social needs she demonstrated led to the improvement of life for these guys- and other lizards. The Komodo dragon program has been an eye opener, not just for reptile conservation, but for understanding reptile intelligence and how this incredible clade of animals functions.
Happy birthday to the lizard who changed it all.
Here’s another baby picture of Kraken! This is her with Dr. Geoffery Birchard, the George Mason professor who supervised her hatching:
She was five weeks old in this picture, which ran in the GMU student paper.
I don’t know what I expected but somehow did not expect a baby komodo dragon to be just so very much regular wee lizard
I’m sorry if no one’s explained this to you before but a content creator telling you that their work isn’t for minors and it’s not their responsibility to jump through hoops to keep it from you is an adult looking out for kids. they’re modeling good boundaries and setting the expectation that you’ll engage with the online community like a person and take responsibility for your choices. if you cannot understand that you need to look out for yourself and take people seriously when they say their work isn’t suitable for young audiences then you are not ready to be unsupervised on the internet.
saw a post recently that went smth like this. if u see it pls tag the person i wanna credit them
OKOK THE OG POST IS THIS
I cannot believe there's absolutely no way to watch free shows and movies anymore, there are too many paid streaming platforms and pirating websites have viruses and ads preventing you from watching it uninterrupted((.)) id rather follow the rules and purchase media moving forward because it is too inconvenient. Seriously, free and no ads or viruses with 1080p streaming is DEAD.
Exactly! It's freaking annoying when I want to watch movies but I would have to subscribe to like 24 different services . Just to watch the shows that I like.
Oh and wouldn’t it be nice for cartoons? Just anything animated. I just wanna stream things without getting conned. Must I be cartoonless forever?
i like using streaming apps but there are waaaay too many and they're all stealing my data .i wish there was a secure and organized way to have millions of shows and movies available one one app. but alas. we've truly gone full circle back to cable now it spies on you. its a real shame. i dont want to fill my device storage with tons of boring and stupid cash grabs.
i know, it's so annoying for everything to be paid nowadays, especially movies and tv shows. it would be perfect if i could watch them without getting infected by some virus or some shit. i'm fine with ads, they gotta run themselves somehow, but i want to watch stuff and .live! if they have to use different domains i'm okay with that too, because free media is .top dog either way.
for mobile users, it especially sucks, because you can't just use websites and you have to not only pay, but you have to download a billion apps just to find what the thing you wanna watch is on. it doesn't help that the streaming services take up...so much space. so much.
Hey do y'all remember several years ago when we were all freaking out about net neutrality being overturned? Well despite net neutrality's win in 2024, a federal court just overturned it.
For those who aren't aware, net neutrality is the simple principle that companies like Verizon and Comcast should treat all web traffic equally – not pick and choose based on who is willing to pay more or who they like best. Big Tech companies obviously don’t like that – which is why they spent millions lobbying against it over the years.
Now, these megacorporations will be able to seize control back over our Internet. The likely result? Throttled access to streaming services, monopolistic pricing that cuts out competition, and a slower, walled off, and less free Internet for all of us.
And unfortunately, rulings like this will only get more common now that the Supreme Court has overturned the “Chevron deference” – giving judges, rather than qualified public servants, a blank check to toss out protections like net neutrality, environmental safeguards, or food safety standards.
When Trump’s FCC repealed net neutrality back in 2017, they gave big corporations total control over our Internet – putting free and open access at risk.
Internet providers responded by exploiting their newfound power to speed up certain websites, and slow down – or even block – others. They failed to provide crucial Internet infrastructure in rural areas, low-income communities, and communities of color. They even slashed firefighters’ Internet access during severe wildfires.
But over 126,000 people spoke out and we were able to reinstate net neutrality – until now.
The time has come again to take action: please sign this petition from Common Cause so we can reinstate net neutrality.
My fucking phone's data has been acting slower than usual lately. I'm fucking pissed if this is why.
so like imagine Undertale characters but they're all crafts supplies