When I was 7 years old and at the optometrist, I was what’s known as a Little Shit. I didn’t sit still. I didn’t want to read the letters. I didn’t want to do anything except go home. Eventually, my mom bribed me with a kitten. A PERSIAN kitten, freshly purchased from the extremely shady pet shop directly across the street. It worked like a charm, I’m sad to say, because I’m extremely vulnerable to kittens. tbh, considering the way my mom was looking at those kittens, she would have bought one anyway.
My dad says that she always did have a weakness for dumb animals. “It’s why she married me,” he always says. Anyway, this is a story about a Very Dumb Cat, not Heterosexual Hilarity Hour.
This kitten weighed about a pound and I suspect 75% of that was fluff. She was smokey grey, had a perfect little nose (she was what’s called a doll-faced or traditional Persian. No pug faces here!), and had the IQ of a hammer.
I mean this with all the love in my heart, but you could just look into those eyes and absolutely KNOW that there was nothing going on in there. It wasn’t even a case of ‘no lights on upstairs’. There wasn’t even an upstairs. There wasn’t even a ground floor. There was just NOTHING going on in there.
Kiki didn’t understand some simple concepts—-stairs, for example. She never figured them out, even after 7 years of living in a house with stairs. Her preferred method of locomotion was to cry very loudly until someone carried her where she wanted to go. One could argue that this was, in fact, very clever of her.
Please don’t give her the credit. It was pretty clear that she was simply confused about how stairs could go up AND down at the same time.
TBH, she never figured out how to get onto furniture either. She was fully capable of jumping and playing like any other cat, but it seemed as soon as she had to THINK about something, everything else shut down. Like… one day, I was playing with her and a piece of string. She was delighted and jumping and playing. Just normal kitten stuff. Then she decided she wanted to sit in my lap instead. I mean, i SAY “decided”, but it could’ve just been a passing air mote depositing the idea in her head.
The point is, she abruptly forgot how to jump onto furniture. She forgot how to JUMP. She just kinda sat there and stared at me for a few seconds before starting to cry. She was actually pretty distressed by it and didn’t stop until I picked her up for a cuddle. Thankfully, she seemed to forget it pretty quickly. No room for anything besides the moment, I guess.
She also never grew very much. Even as an adult, she barely pushed 3 pounds. She also had a serious dental issue. Her canines stuck straight out horizontally. They weren’t very big so they didn’t push past her lips or anything, but it was the most baffling thing her vet had ever seen.
I loved that dumb animal. She was a very good girl and I miss her.
Actually, full bred persian cats are… very stupid. As in negative IQ points.
Honestly? Accurate. Kiki was just especially dim even for a persian cat. Like she started off with a breed handicap and just went lower.
Here’s a paper:
It’s apparently a result of their head shape- we tend to focus on the flat faces of ultra typed Persians and forget their entire skulls are rounded and compacted compared to a normal cat’s. There’s not enough room up there for regular brain development, so they tend to be a bit lacking in a myriad of areas. Persians with longer faces can still wind up dim witted if other parts of their head are still squished in.
YIKES I just read through & those results are quite damning. it should be common sense that deforming the head so severely would damage the brain, but it honestly never occurred to me. no wonder the Germans use Persians as the poster-child for ‘torture breeding’
“Shh, it’s alright,” the villain said. “You’re doing beautifully and I’m so proud of you. But that’s enough now. It was cruel of them to make you fight me – you could never have won. It’s not your fault.”
The ancient and powerful villain may have had a calm and gentle face as he spoke, but he was furious, not at the hero, but the gods for continually sending kids and teenagers to fight their battles.
Child heros that ‘turned to the dark side’ who are actually being taken care of by The Ancient Villain. Turning away from the Powers That Be because they realized they’ve been used as a sacrifice. The Ancient Villain refusing to fight 11 year old Chosen Ones and ending up with a lair full of adoptive baby heros and teen heros who protect them.
The Brady Bunch but with a single villain and like 15 kids.
“Jesus christ eat the goddamn mac and cheese.” scowls the hero “I can hear your stomach growling through your armor, you know.”
The villain blinks “You-”
“Are feeding you, yes. If all I wanted to do was punch people and throw criminals in jail, I would’ve become a vigilante. Heroism involves kindness, dipshit.”
“Heroism involves kindness, dipshit” is the most amazing phrase I’ve ever read. I need to incorporate it into all my work.
real power is going outside knowing you look ugly and also knowing that if you chose to perform femininity in accordance with patriarchal standards you could look attractive, but genuinely prefering to look ugly and not feeling bad about it. feels good feels organic
Me: shows up to work merely clean and well dressed like all the males there
Boss: you look tired
Me: 🖕
I was in a job orientation once and the instructor was talking about appropriate work attire and literally said “and women….please wear some makeup” and everyone laughed. I, who was not wearing makeup nor do I ever, raised my hand and asked “What’s the required amount of makeup for men?” And that was an amazingly wonderful awkward silence.
Quote from an acrticle about this steaming pile of transphobic shit:
“During an event that prepares children to survive an attack by actual assailants, she was treated as if she was so much of a danger to peers that she was left exposed and vulnerable”
They made her sit in the gym while everyone else was hiding. Putting priority on noone entering the opposite-gender locker room in a life-or-very-violent-death situation is messed up enough as it is, but they told A CHILD that because she’s trans she is more dangerous to her classmates than a psychopath with a firearm.
(America’s a Fucking Disease playing in the background)
If you’ve logged in to Tumblr in the last few days, you will have seen the GDPR warning, telling you Tumblr is part of the Oath family of sites, and requiring you to opt-in to their privacy settings.
You may not have realised that, in contravention of the GDPR rules which ban default opt-ins, if you don’t go into the ‘more options’ button and opt out of each individual sharing partner, Tumblr will share your data with a whole huge list of other companies. Like, 300 of them.
If you’ve already opted in to the Oath privacy stuff, you need to go to your Settings page:
Click the Privacy button on the right:
Then, click the little button next to ‘Cookie Consent’ to revoke it.
After confirming you want to revoke consent, you will immediately be taken to that big privacy opt-in page again. From that point we follow the steps @the-mad-duchess described – first click ‘Manage Options’:
Then, click the blue ‘Manage’ button, and expand the two lists. You’ll see five kinds of data sharing, and like 300 different companies:
The first five you can click manually more easily than using javascript. That might be enough to opt out of any data sharing – but I want to be sure. So, let’s make sure we disable every single enabled partner as well.
However, clicking on 300 little buttons to opt out of is an absurd demand. There is, thankfully, a shortcut, using your browser’s developer tools.
What you want to do is open the web console. In Firefox, you do it like this: click the little menu in top right, then go down to where it says Web Developer:
Then, click the Web Console option:
This will open up the web console in the bottom of the screen. It will have a bunch of messages in it that you can ignore:
As shown, what we want to do is copy and paste some JavaScript code into this, then hit ‘enter’, which will make the browser simulate a mouseclick on every single one of these little buttons and thereby turn them all off. The code is this:
var rows = document.getElementsByClassName("vendor-options")[0].children;
for (var i = 0; i < rows.length; i++) {rows[i].lastChild.firstChild.click();}
If you’re not familiar with JavaScript, let me briefly explain what this is doing. The first line finds the part of the page with all the buttons in it – specifically, the rows in the table of vendors, which is identified by the “vendor-options”. The second line goes through each of them one by one, and for each row of the table, goes inside and finds the button, and simulates a click on it.
If it works correctly, you will abruptly scroll to the bottom of the page and all those little buttons will slide to the ‘greyed out’ position. Now you can go ahead and click Done, click the OK button, and carry on using Tumblr, trusting that if they keep their word, they won’t share your data with those 300 companies.
I’m gonna chat with the New XKit devs to see if this can be added (they may already be working on it). But I hope this saves you some time.
Note also – this is not actually compliant with the new GDPR laws. The rule is that you have to explicitly opt in to letting companies use your data, you can’t have a list of default opt-ins behind a button like this. At some point, somebody will hopefully sue Yahoo/Oath and establish that in court. In the meantime, let’s keep our data to ourselves.
Thanks for the easy/quick fix. Also don’t forget to go back to “Manage Options” and then hit “Accept” instead of hitting “Okay” on the front page. Hitting Okay will reset all the work you just did.
you really have to stop treating your friends like therapists. they are not your therapists. you cannot bind them with the entirety of your deep set trauma and only seek them out for the alleviation of your pain (regardless of how severe your pain is!) when you give minimal return. a friendship is dual-sided, mutually beneficial. a friendship is when you listen and you reflect because you care about them. a friendship can heal you, but if all you do is neglect the needs of the other, than you are not acting as a friend. if all you do is take and expect them to take, you are not acting as a friend. really, you are acting as someone who believes that they are completely entitled to the emotional labor of someone else for free. if you want to have good friends who are there for you, be a good friend first. if you need someone to talk to, find a therapist. a therapist and a friend are not interchangeable.
breaking bad, fight club, rick and morty, clockwork orange, and the catcher in the rye are all arguably good things – but if a man says they are his FAVORITE book/movie/tv show? RUN.
Can someone explain this to me?
They’re all works that are examinations of compelling but deeply flawed (usually narcissistic and violent) men. People rightly like all these works because they are good, but the implication of the original post is that if a guy says they are his favorite work, he is probably misunderstanding the point of the work and instead idolizing the male protagonist and is unable to recognize their flaws.
yeah if you dont socialize boys from birth to only see women as sex partners/objects and normalize healthy non-sexual/romantic friendships between men and women
BITCH THIS WAS A READ
Nerd warning ahead: This, I think, is actually what Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night, is all about.
At the start of the play, the Duke thinks he’s in love with Olivia, but he’s acting like a parody of a Petrarchan sonnet–very whiney and emo and writing bad poetry. He’s never even had an actual conversation with her, and says outright that he doesn’t think that women can love as much or as true as a man can. Douche. When he thinks that Olivia has utterly rejected him, he threatens violence.
Viola dresses up as an young man and gets a job working for the duke. They become really good friends. They share secrets. The duke trusts “him”. (there are strong hints that the duke is physically attracted to this “young man” who is his best friend). At the end, when he discovers that his best friend is actualy a woman, he asks her to marry him.
It’s almost as if Shakespeare is saying that the traditional image of romantic love between men and women is impossible and stupid, because men and women never actually get to know one another as friends. It’s almost as though Shakespeare is saying that two men would have a much better chance at true love than a man and a woman because of the way their culture keeps them seperated from one another.
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