like this one dude just made a fake taxidermy and spread it around as a hoax for a good ass while and it lead to this really cool fantasy creature and i am genuinely dissapointed that it never gets used in anything
The lack of skvaders is particularly frustrating when you realize it forms the third point of a wonderful cryptid trifecta.
You got the jackalopes, which are rabbits with antlers.
And you got the wolpertingers, which are rabbits with antlers and wings.
And then… what? Do you escalate? That’s unbalanced, those two rabbit cryptids don’t have the same number of extra things, the wolpertinger is clearly the jackalope But More.
BUT with the skvader on the other side, balance is restored. Antler rabbit, winged rabbit, winged antler rabbit. It’s a classic Venn diagram of imaginary lapine beasts, and it’s only complete if you acknowledge the fucking skvader.
I’ve been wondering this on and off, and I figured I might as well get around to asking:
Are other people’s imaginations shut down or impaired when they’re sick?
Mine is: I pretty much don’t have visualised fantasies at all when I’m sick, and what fantasies I do have are much fewer in number and much less vivid. I can think of possible explanations that lead to both “this is a very common experience” (maybe it’s part of the cognitive issues that come with the brain’s convalescence mode) and “this is a very rare experience” (maybe it’s my brain’s way of resolving the conflict in the instinctive How to Respond to Illness code between “get lots of rest” and “avoid getting pregnant”, forcing a loss of libido by rendering me incapable of sexual fantasies (and, as a side effect, non-sexual fantasies)).
Anyone know how common imagination impairments are when sick? Failing that, anyone have anecdotal experience about whether this happens to them?
Still curious about this.
justice-turtle said: I know my whole conscious brain always feels kind of slow when I’m sick, like it’s not getting a supply of spoons to do anything. I still have exhaustingly vivid weird dreams, though.
Tags:
#(December 2016) #conversational aglets #replies #illness tw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
So for the past two years or so I’ve been slowly working my way through the Red Panda Adventures. Recently I reached episode 100. Towards the end, our heroes are surrounded by a group of hostile sapient zombies (long story). There are too many to take them all out in combat, so the Red Panda uses his mind-control powers to put them to sleep. This being a Christmas special, he begins this process by calming them through evoking the joy and contentment of Christmas.
“You idiot!” I yelled. “You’re begging for an abreaction!”
(I managed not to actually yell this out loud. I was out for a walk, as is my custom when listening to the Red Panda Adventures, and I didn’t want the neighbours to get weirded out.)
For those of you who don’t speak hypnosis jargon, basically an “abreaction” is when a hypnotised person responds to a suggestion in an unexpected manner, generally because they interpreted it in a way the hypnotist didn’t intend, or something about the phrasing reminded them of something and sent their mind off on a different track, stuff like that. It doesn’t necessarily go badly 100% of the time, but–like all forms of miscommunication–it’s usually best avoided when possible, and this one definitely would go badly if it happened.
The trouble is, not everyone associates Christmas with joy and contentment. All it takes is one bitter Jewish kid (*ahem*) or something, one person whose associations with Christmas are negative, and the thing’s going to blow up in his face.
Now, hypnosis as practised in the Red-Panda-verse is very different from the real thing, so in the abstract it’s not inherently a bad thing to have this in-universe expert hypnotist doing things that even I, a person with no training who simply travels in the right circles to overhear hypnotists talking shop with each other, recognise as mistakes. But in this case, the differences between our universe and his make this worse. In the real world, if your induction backfires because it turns out your subject hates Christmas, you just feel kind of awkward and embarrassed and have hopefully learned a valuable lesson about not assuming everyone likes Christmas. But because he’s weaponising his psychic powers, his suggestions have to work, first try, without a hitch, without discussing it with the subject in advance, or he might die. It is, literally, vitally important for him to keep his inductions as generic and universal as possible, and not pull risky, your-mileage-may-vary shit like the spirit of fucking Christmas.
(For the record, he got lucky and it didn’t backfire on anyone. Still a stupid risk.)
To be fair, it’s easier for me to spot this because, as a bitter Jewish kid myself, I didn’t have to put myself in anyone else’s place to see why this was risky. I can tell you right now, anyone tries an induction on me based on the feeling of Christmas (foreignness and resentment and the particular type of lonelinessone feels when surrounded by a crowd of happy people whose joy one will never share*), it ain’t gonna go well.
*You know what, Christmas could actually make a decent metaphor for being undead, or vice versa.
amango-tea said: Christmas for me was anxiety attacks and spending extra time with my abusive father because he was off work and you’re SUPPOSED to spend time with your family. If someone tried that trick on me, I hope they would be willing to deal with me being triggered as fuck! :Db
—
(There was also another reply, but I posted it at the time [link].)
Tags:
#(October 2016) #conversational aglets #replies #abuse cw #Red Panda Adventures #reactionblogging #sexuality and lack thereof #rants
I was wondering today, how come I’ve never seen mind-control fetishists talking about BBC Merlin? And only seen one piece of erotic fanfiction set in that universe?
That show had such ridiculous quantities of mind control. When it wasn’t plain mind-control magic, it was zombification (in both the “resurrection” and “enthrallment” senses simultaneously, though–at least in the case I’m thinking of–not in the “non-sapient” sense). Or love spells. Or possession. Or mind-altering parasites. Or getting their wills broken the mundane way, with torture.
One time, in series 4 IIRC, there was a five-episode streak in which somebody got mind-controlled in every episode. Not a five-episode arc involving mind control: five individual plots. It was almost half the season.
(I started laughing at episode 4 of the streak, when they said the Lamia could control men’s minds. Mom asked what was funny, and I had to take a moment to try to see it from the outside, how suspicious it would seem that I was the first one to notice despite not really paying that much attention. *I* knew it was because my salience mechanisms were attuned differently than hers, but would she be able to work that out? I don’t want my mom knowing my kinks.
After a moment, I decided I could pass it off as coincidence that I just happened to be paying attention at the right times, and told her about the streak. When the “next time on” showed the abovementioned zombification, she was laughing too.)
Was I just in the wrong places at the wrong times? Is that why I never saw anyone discussing this?
navelgazed said: Tbh that episode where merlin had to make Arthur as buffoonish as possible (no clue when that was) was like…whoa.
wait I’m confused, what is a star worshipper and why does this make you feel broken (don’t have to answer if you don’t wanna, just curious)
I was using “star-worshipper” to mean people for whom looking at the night sky inspires awe. They tend to go on about how light pollution is bad for the soul and I’m not complete as a person until I’ve seen the Milky Way with my own eyes. I’ve heard this sort of thing enough over the years that I’m now sensitised to it: even things that, taken on their own, are value-neutral or only mildly charged statements about stargazing and the absence thereof tend to make me bristle because they invoke all these other memories of proselytising star-worshippers. (There have also been at least one or two statements in the textbook that were more than mildly charged.)
Now that I think about it, making the entire link and only the link italicised might have obscured the fact that it was a link. The last couple paragraphs of the linked post explain why it makes me feel broken.
lizardywizard said: ah yeah I was on mobile and that didn’t even show up as a link for me for some reason! (no offence taken!)
Tags:
#(June 2016) #conversational aglets #(I’m going to start queueing these again) #(there seem to be quite a few of them) #replies #adventures in University Land #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
Welcome back! I’m afraid I didn’t notice when you left…
I didn’t say much about it because…well, first of all it’s very hard to talk about going to Disney World without sounding awkwardly frivolous. It sounded awkwardly frivolous to me when Mom first said we were going. On the other hand, that “first said we were going” was two years ago. There’s been a fair few obstacles in the family’s path over those two years, and I saw the way that the thought of a Disney trip at the end of the tunnel kept Mom going. It was probably worth it for that alone.
(Especially when she managed to convince them to give us a whole bunch of Disney restaurant credits: one “snack” (roughly what you’d think it means, though it had to have a symbol next to it on the menu indicating you could use a credit on it) and two fast-food “meals” (entree, beverage, dessert, though you could swap out any or all of those three for any available snack) per person per day. She got all this for the low, low price of researching Disney enough to hear about the free-food promotion (that bit wasn’t really a price, as she enjoyed it), staying up most of one night to get in as soon as the deal opened, spending an hour and a half on hold while trying not to fall asleep, and promising to stay in a Disney-owned hotel and schedule our trip for mid-September, which is apparently a relatively bad time for them profit-wise because most kids have just gone back to school. Joke’s on them: we were going to go then regardless, and I think we were going to be in a Disney hotel too.
The portions in Disney, for the record, are very big, and our appetites (especially mine) are not so big, so it was rather more credits than we could actually use on the trip itself. We ended up bringing back about a hundred chocolate bars to eat at home later, as they were the least perishable tasty thing available for a snack credit.)
Also, I was taught as a young child that the fact that one is leaving one’s house unoccupied is a vulnerability that should be kept secret as much as practical until after it is over. Intellectually, I’m not convinced this is reasonable advice, but on more visceral levels I’ve inherited much of the paranoia of my native culture, and perhaps added some of my own.
This all actually sounds pretty cool. I hope you had fun!
Tags:
#(September 2015) #(was checking my ”replies” tag to confirm that I’d already posted a reply at the time and found this other post) #conversational aglets #Disney #food
Brinens and Things 