"you will look for themes and motifs in media that isn't worth the effort" i will look for themes and motifs in the dirt. on the ground.

jon and basira's dynamic in the first half of s4 is extremely funny because jon keeps going "basira I know you want to keep important things from me but I think you're being stupid" and basira will say "why?" and he'll say "because you're acting a lot like me."

trains are extremely sexual actually, have you seen couplers????

john “the mountain goats” darnielle’s 2021 new year’s eve twitter thread, for those who missed it

[Image Description: several screenshots of a Twitter thread by The Mountain Goats.

1: So I was washing potatoes last night when I got excited

It was just one of those moments. You know. I was getting dinner together and I looked at the ingredients coming together on the counter

And I thought to myself, and and said aloud. "Hell yes, I have three potatoes"

Living with me means having to develop a robust tolerance for hearing a guy occasionally cry out aloud: saying, for example, "Hell yes, I have three potatoes"

2: But over and above my everyday state of excitement about the ten trillion small things that ease the path a little -- colors, shades, sounds, flavors, sensations, moods, fleeting thoughts, moments of transcendence when you're very lucky --

I had one of those moments of gratitude to have food. And not just the food, but a counter to prep it on and a stove for cooking

But it wasn't just the food and the kitchen and the comforts of home either

It was me standing at the stove of a house where I'm safe. Got here on my own two feet. Had a lot of help. Plenty of points where I wouldn't have bet on the outcome. Now I have three potatoes, you know?

3: Here's the thing

Some of you reading this are in houses where you're not safe all the time, and I know it

Some of you are day-to-day with a thousand different troubles and on any given day you feel like you might buckle

Maybe you've felt like that a lot of times over the past couple years. A lot of people have. Some people felt that way who'd had some preparation, and some people have found themselves navigating scary, unfamiliar straits

4: But if you're reading this right now you've managed to make it work. Maybe it doesn't feel like it worked all that well, maybe you feel like you're coasting across the goal line with no fuel at all left in the tank,

But here you are

Here you are.

Having found some way to nourish yourself through it.

Look at the calendar, look at the clock. You sustained yourself through this. Maybe you got sick, maybe it was real bad. Maybe some things got better and maybe they got worse. But give yourself the gift of a long look in the mirror

5: Look at the person hard, uncertain times, in days of sickness everywhere, will see another year

That's the person who will do it again, and to that person, over and over, I say, loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

Hell yes, hell yes, hell yes, hell yes, hell yes

From all of us here at Mountain Goats Central a thank you for seeing us through 2021. It was so good to see you in the flesh again. Stay safe. Trust yourselves. We will see one another through to safer times

6: This year's New Year's Eve thread is dedicated to that one guy who's mad about people wishing one another happy new year, may he never know why people actually do it

And may the rest of us collectively, defiantly, never forget it /thread

/End ID]

would you still love me if i was a worm?

@wearepaladin

The Gävle goat is getting a lot of attention around here, but I would like to make a case for a couple of other Swedish Christmas goats: The Kävlinge “Horny Goats”.

It has been a Christmas tradition in the town of Kävlinge since 2015 to put up a pair of goats in a traffic circle. And for just as long, there has been a somewhat more inofficial tradition that someone will move those two goats into a mating position, giving them the nickname “kåtbockarna” (literally “the horny goats”, a Swedish term similar to the English “horndog”).

One year an unknown person even put up three smaller goats around the two large ones, to indicate that they’ve had children.

This year, however, the goats have been positioned in a somewhat less intimate position, simply kissing eachother:

Swedish television news did a short feature where they interviewed citizens of Kävlinge about this latest change, and most of them expressed disappointment, apparently preferring the “horny” version.

Considering that “bock” usually refers to males of the species, this means that Kävlinge has had a public display of gay sex each Christmas for several years, enthusiastically supported by its citizens. I think that’s a Christmas tradition well worth celebrating.

I guess what I think is that suicide is a symptom of a problem and not the problem to fix, you know what I mean? To stop suicides you have to stop people’s mental health from getting to the point where they consider it, you have to treat the disease, trying to treat the symptom itself is almost completely useless.

For instance, Japan has spent a great deal of money on anti-suicide infrastructure, doing genuinely cartoonishly things like putting rollers on bridge railings so you can’t climb over them and slide right off, putting blue lights in the subway so it’s harder to see to throw yourself in front of a train. It’s not working. Japan’s suicide rate rose again in 2022. They are not addressing the root causes and stressors in their citizen’s lives and social barriers to mental health care and psychiatric medication.

It’s the same with universities in America, many have spent an exorbitant amount of money on turning their dorms into psych ward like environments. Anti-hanging chairs that you can’t stand on, bunks you can’t hang yourself from, slanted doorknobs etc. And yet suicide is still the second leading cause of death for college students. They make no attempts to make college easier, to make pausing and resuming your studies better, to make the pressure of an academic environment feel less life or death. They make no accommodations for the individual. They just make it a little harder to hang yourself in a few rooms on campus and call it a day, say they’re being proactive in terms of mental health.

"saying (x thing i find annoying) is a symptom of autism is actually ablest because you're implying autistic people are annoying and also i'm autistic and don't do anything annoying thing so" i think it'd be easier to understand that despite how memified autism is on this site, not every autistic trait is cool and sexy, sometimes people's autism manifests in a way that's not easily digestible, or genuinely off putting and obnoxious. and they still don't deserve to be bullied, but also you are not immune to being annoyed by autistic people (even if you're also autistic, i'm also not immune to this)

thinking about that one tumblr post where someone was like "neurotypicals please stop tapping your feet while i'm trying to focus" and someone responded "um actually i'm autistic and tapping my feet is how i stim, so you're being ableist as fuck rn" and like. kind of arguing weather or not tapping your feet is ableist or not and like. sometimes other autistic people are gonna bother you actually. not sure what to say about that.

We have a bird playing on our skylight window.