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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

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Coffee Poll

For coffee drinkers only, no other, no 0 options, if you don't drink coffee please be patient and check back at the end for the results.

This is asking how many cups (1 cup = 8 ounces) of coffee you drink in an everage day. Not your max, just average how much coffee you drink every day. Round to the closest whole number, so if you drink 30 oz on average, vote for 4 cups.

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have you seen this one by chance? saw it reposted to pinterest and thought of my favorite public transit blog

Finally a way to market trains to the cruel capitalist

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"If you write sympathetically about a homophobic character you're homophobic"

I, an entire lesbian, acknowledge both in real life and in the fiction that I write that people are complicated and certain people, especially older people, cannot help the environment they were raised in, the parents they had, the dominant values of their culture at the time their values were instilled in them, etc.

From a Buddhist perspective, everyone has their own "causes and conditions," as my teacher would say, that makes them the way they are. We don't choose those things. And it's hard to overcome that early training that becomes your knee jerk reaction to things. You, a gay person, have your own biases and knee jerk reactions that could stand to be questioned. Yes, you.

My grandfather is homophobic. When I came out as a teenager he told my mom that he and my grandma would love me "in spite of" my sexuality. And that hurt! But at the same time, I'm grateful my family didn't disown me, because they are in a fundamentalist Christian cult and they very much could have decided it was their moral duty to cut me out of their lives.

My grandfather was born into a cult. He didn't choose that. Cults are designed to control people's minds. He can't help that he was born to be brainwashed. And despite everything, I would say that he's generally, though not always and not radically, a compassionate person.

He is a weird mixture of conservative and liberal views because he is a complicated man. Due to the cult conditioning, he believes a lot of conspiracy theories. But he also believes in Universal Basic Income and universal healthcare.

He's not all bad or all good, and I love and accept him the way he is, even the parts that hurt or frustrate me. And he doesn't preach to me or make me feel unloved or unaccepted because of my sexuality.

I even visited with my girlfriend a few years ago and we had pleasant conversation together. He even bonded with her over being in the military. He was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war, meaning he had to be in the army because of the draft but he refused to carry a gun or kill anyone.

People complain about the show Glee but my grandfather watched that show, much to my surprise. And I think seeing a sympathetic gay character go through rejection and the painful fallout of that, as well as seeing the gay character have a loving parent who was trying, had an impact on him.

Acknowledging, either IRL or in fiction, that people are complicated and being homophobic doesn't necessarily mean someone is evil or irredeemable does not make someone homophobic. I know we're allergic to nuance on the internet but I'm going to keep accepting the fact that we can love and have complicated relationships with the homophobes in our lives.

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Even if I didn’t have a solid plan, in the back of my head, I always assumed I’d kill myself.

Now I’m an adult and people my age have their lives in order and I’m stuck here, confused, because I never planned to be alive and I’m so far behind.

I feel like I’ll never catch up.

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we’ve made autism into a small insignificant personality trait/identity like being queer and that’s actually so fucking wrong and insulting

37.9% of autistics have an intellectual disability

1/3rd of autistics are completely nonspeaking

most autistics will not be able to hold a job, go to college, or live on their own

autism rarely travels alone and has many medical comorbidities like epilepsy, mitochondrial disorders, and genetic disorders (which are the most common comorbidities - these aren’t rare complications.)

we can have discussions about autism and ableism and how society sees us without spreading misinformation.

autism is a lifelong, often debilitating neurodevelopmental and genetic disorder that affects how one communicates and interacts with the world. it is not “just being socially awkward” or feeling nervous in social situations. it is a neurological disability. start treating it like one.

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adults are always talking about how “kids will do anything to get out of school” and okay, first of all that’s not true, but I think we really need to ask why that idea holds so much sway.

children’s brains are hard-wired to take in new information and acquire new skills. consider, for a moment, just how thoroughly our society had to fuck up the concept of education for it to be a normal thing to assume kids are universally desperate to avoid learning.

#I agree that school is hard #people at work don't have the time to bully you as much as kids at school #on the other hand #I've never had a job with mandatory outdoor play time

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Out of curiosity and also guilt over my own coffee intake. I wanna ask:

Now I'm not talking about when you're studying and so you drink 3x the usual amount or something like that. This isn't me asking what your record is. I'm talking about the most basic, average day, how many coffees you drink?

#huh #that seems to skew low #oh right #I'm on the neurodivergent website

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You guys really liked my last poll so

#in a geode to enjoy the shiny

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Okay I'm almost done with Fellowship, here's an incomplete list of shit I noticed and thought was buck fucking wild on my first ever read-thru: medieval edition.

In literally the second line of the book, Tolkien implies that Bilbo Baggins wrote a story which was preserved alongside the in-universe version of the Mabinogion (aka the best-known collection of Welsh myths; I promise this is batshit). This is because The Hobbit has been preserved, in Tolkien's AU version of our world, in a "selection of the Red Book of Westmarch" (Prologue, Concerning Hobbits). If you're a medievalist and you see something called "The Red Book of" or "The Black Book of" etc it's a Thing. In this case, a cheeky reference to the Red Book of Hergest (Llyfr Coch Hergest). There are a few Red Books, but only Hergest has stories).

not a medieval thing but i did not expect one common theory among hobbits for the death of Frodo's parents to be A RUMORED MURDER-SUICIDE.

At the beginning of the book a few hobbits report seeing a moving elm tree up on the moors, heading west (thru or past the Shire). I mentioned this in another post, but another rule: if you see an elm tree, that's a Girl Tree. In Norse creation myth, the first people were carved from driftwood by the gods. Their names were Askr (Ash, as in the tree), the first man, and Embla (debated, but likely elm tree), the first woman. A lot of ppl have I think guessed that that was an ent-wife, but like. Literally that was a GIRL. TREE.

Medieval thing: I used to read the runes on the covers of The Hobbit and LOTR for fun when I worked in a bookshop. There's a mix of Old Norse (viking) and Old English runes in use, but all the ones I've noticed so far are real and readable if you know runes.

Tom Bombadil makes perfect sense if you once spent months of your life researching the early medieval art of galdor, which was the use of poems or songs to do a form of word-magic, often incorporating gibberish. If you think maybe Tolkien did not base the entirety of Fellowship so far around learning and using galdor and thus the power of words and stories, that is fine I cannot force you. He did personally translate "galdor" in Beowulf as "spell" (spell, amusingly, used to mean "story"). And also he named an elf Galdor. Like he very much did name an elf Galdor.

Tom Bombadil in fact does galdor from the moment we meet him. He arrives and fights the evil galdor (song) of the willow tree ("old gray willow-man, he's a mighty singer"), which is singing the hobbits to sleep and possibly eating them, with a galdor (song) of his own. Then he wanders off still singing, incorporating gibberish. I think it was at this point that I started clawing my face.

THEN Tom Bombadil makes perfect sense if you've read the description of the scop's songs in Beowulf (Beowulf again, but hey, Tolkien did famously a. translate it b. write a fanfiction about it called Sellic Spell where he gave Beowulf an arguably homoerotic Best Friend). The scop (pronounched shop) is a poet who sings about deeds on earth, but also by profession must know how to sing the song or tell the story of how the cosmos itself came to be. The wise-singer who knows the deep lore of the early universe is a standard trope in Old English literature, not just Beowulf! Anyway Tom Bombadil takes everyone home and tells them THE ENTIRE STORY OF ALL THE AGES OF THE EARTH BACKWARDS UNTIL JUST BEFORE THE MOMENT OF CREATION, THE BIG BANG ITSELF and then Frodo Baggins falls asleep.

Tom Bombadil knows about plate tectonics

This is sort of a lie, Tom Bombadil describes the oceans of old being in a different place, which works as a standard visual of Old English creation, which being Christian followed vaguely Genesis lines, and vaguely Christian Genesis involves a lot of water. TOLKIEN knew about plate tectonics though.

Actually I just checked whether Tolkien knew about plate tectonics because I know the advent of plate tectonics theory took forever bc people HATED it and Alfred Wegener suffered for like 50 years. So! actually while Tolkien was writing LOTR, the scientific community was literally still not sure plate tectonics existed. Tom Bombadil knew tho.

Remember that next time you (a geologist) are forced to look at the Middle Earth map.

I'm not even done with Tom Bombadil but I'm stopping here tonight. Plate tectonics got me. There's a great early (but almost high!) medieval treatise on cosmology and also volcanoes and i wonder if tolkien read it. oh my god. i'm going to bed.

edit: part II

#I disagree with OP on one point #because everything they've said #including (especially) the part where this was their first read-through #makes me even more convinced that the elm tree was an ent

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Incomplete list of stuff that made me go apeshit reading Fellowship for the first time, medievalist edition (part II)

Part I here. Disclaimer: this is for fun!

Love that people keep stressing that they are going to the ELVES for COUNCIL. Old English names, especially among the rulers of Wessex, Northumbria, Mercia, etc, were often Elf Theme Names, one of the most famous and enduring of which is Alfred. Written the old way, Ælfræd or Ælfred (as in Alfred the Great), means Elf-Council, aka "counseled by elves". In their hearts... everyone wants to be Alfred... possibly this is only funny 2 me.

Tom Bombadil doing a training montage in the fucking magic system of Middle Earth?? He teaches Frodo to recite a poem that will summon him, Tom Bombadil, in times of need! Frodo gets kidnapped by undead wights in a barrow (like many a good young person in an Old Norse saga before him) and dutifully recites this magic poem. Frodo learned Recite Magic Poem! TOM BOMBADIL SMASHES THRU THE WALL OF THE BARROW LIKE THE KOOL-ADE MAN AND RECITES A BIGGER, STRONGER POEM??

At this point I gave up on trying to be normal about anything. As such, I'm pausing on Tom Bombadil again.

It helped (?? not psychologically) that Tom Bombadil recited something that felt a bit familiar, when he banished the wights. It's not anything like a direct translation, if indeed it bears any purposeful resemblance to the actual recorded medieval galdor called Against a Wen. Regardless, Against a Wen is an okay?? example of what a spoken word magic poem would look like, and why it's similar to what Tom Bombadil (and later Gandalf and others) do. Left screenshot is Bombadil against a barrow-wight. Right is Against a Wen, in English translation. (a wen was possibly a skin ailment, like a mole or a cancer). Banishing to/beyond the hills and shrivelling are the apparent themes. You don't have to follow me on this one, much less agree. Frankly this is the point I went off the deep end, probably.

Galdor can also protect! This just happens to be a banishment.

Gollum got exiled (the worst thing the early medieval and apparently proto-hobbit law could do to you) but not even for murder. No one found out about the murder. He just sucked.

ALSO Gollum lied and said that his matriarch (who exiled him) gave him the Ring. This implies it was plausible she'd give out rings, implying female ring-giver (standard role of a king). This is mentioned once and never again. ok!!

One last fun fact about galdor: it is the word at the end of "nightingale" isn't that lovely? Luthien's name in-universe means nightingale. This is fine!

I spent a lot of time researching Aragorn's favorite rock. I love these books. If I recall correctly it's a real rock! but possibly. just a cool rock.

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Greetings bugs and worms!

This comic is a little different than what I usually do but I worked real hard on it—Maybe I'll make more infographic stuff in the future this ended up being fun. Hope you learned something new :)

If you are still curious and want to learn more about OCD, you can visit the International OCD Foundation's website. I also recommend this amazing TED ED video "Starving The Monster", which was my first introduction to the disorder and this video by John Green about his own experience with OCD.

The IOCDF's website can also help you find support groups, therapy, and has lots of online guides and resources as well if you or a loved one is struggling with the disorder. It is very comprehensive!

Reblog to teach your followers about OCD

(But also not reblogging doesn't make you evil, silly goose)

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#ah yes #such a shock #that I would listen to my mother about how hard it was to quit after she'd smoke for a couple of weeks #instead of fighting every instinct that says “stay away from the unpleasant things” long enough to develop the desire to use them #or fight the instincts once and not try to get used to them enough for them to be fun!

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I got a letter from one of my penpals and the first thing I noticed was like 16/4/24 and I was like "Haha... those Brits" and the very first line of his letter was "I noticed your stupid dating system with the month first so please note how I wrote mine correctly" lmfaooo

#Look #if you want to put day first you can #I don't like it but there's nothing inherently wrong with it #but month first is not only nonsensical #I can't always tell it apart from normal numbering systems #and it makes going through my reciepts a pain #because you have to do forensics to figure out what date it was #it's the LIBRARY using it that bugs me the most though #aren't they supposed to be in favour of information being accessible?

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For those interested, I have a luxury knitwear shop where everything is currently 25% off! I'm looking to raise money to help me move out of a toxic home situation, so any little bit helps!

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OKAY series of polls about sock preferences because i'm a curious autistic fuck:

(if you don't wear socks don't answer any of the other questions)

#I will two of the same sock with different prints #but I've so far managed to avoid having to wear two entirely different socks #so they can look different #but they need to feel the same #borrowed socks is tricky because I have weird feet #odds are they won't fit