peachyimg:

me making eye contact: oh no……. this feels wrong….. this feels very wrong………. but this is what normal people do right?? right????? is this polite? no this is far too intimate. i feel so intrusive. am i doing it wrong??? am i doing eye contact wrong?? oh god i can’t hear what they’re saying anymore i’ve just been thinking about staring them in the eye for 5 minutes straight. im dying

blackbearmagic:

im-pretty-bored:

•buy toys/dolls/crayons
•play with Legos
•play old videogames/dress up games
•weave friendship bracelets
•watch cartoons
•use stickers
•draw pics of your favorite characters

If it makes you feel nice, do it.
Don’t even worry about what other people think, because it doesn’t matter–if it brings you happiness, it’s not “ridiculous”, or “immature”.

You deserve to enjoy yourself.

Let me share with you what I consider to be the most important less I’ve learned in my adult life:

“Growing up doesn’t mean you can’t have Zebra Cakes. Growing up simply means that, if you want to have Zebra Cakes, you buy them for yourself.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Bear?” Well, let me explain. For those of you who live outside of the US, this is a Zebra Cake:

It’s a little pre-packaged snack cake that is horribly cheap and junky and really not that great, but it is like manna from heaven to me. I fucking love these things. When I was a little kid growing up, my mom bought Zebra Cakes but once in a blue moon. They were intended to be put in mine and my siblings’ school lunches, but my brother and I would eat them whenever we wanted, so Mom just didn’t see the point. (They also used to be kind of expensive, at least for our family’s budget.) Needless to say, the coveted Zebra Cakes were a luxury for me, and were one of the tastes of my childhood.

Fast forward to my college years. I was living in an apartment with three other people, doing my own shopping and cooking. I was in the grocery store, picking up some stuff, and I happened to walk past a display of snack cakes. Among them were several boxes of Zebra Cakes.

I paused at this, chuckling to myself. Oh man. Zebra Cakes. I haven’t had those in years. I loved those when I was a kid. I reminisced happily and thought about how much I missed the taste of Zebra Cakes, then started to walk away.

And then I stopped dead.

Because I had realized that there was literally nothing stopping me from buying a box of Zebra Cakes. There was nothing stopping me from buying ten boxes of Zebra Cakes. If I wanted Zebra Cakes, I could have goddamn Zebra Cakes, because it was my money and my decision to make.

I put two boxes in my cart (they were 2 for $5) and never looked back.

Here’s the secret I learned that day: The idea of something being “just for kids” is, by and large, bullshit. What you do on your own adult free time with your own adult money is, by its very nature, adult stuff. It’s like comedian Eddie Izzard (who frequently performed his routines in drag) once said when someone asked about him wearing ‘women’s clothes’: “They’re not women’s clothes. They’re my clothes. I bought them.”

I am 25 years old, and yesterday I bought myself a shark lunchbox. Look at it. Look at how awesome my lunchbox is.

Was this lunchbox intended to by bought for and used by a child? Yes. The tag said it was for ages 3 and up. But it was bought by and will be used by an adult, and anyone who thinks that’s wrong is probably just jealous that they don’t have the self-confidence to rock a shark lunchbox at 25.

So like. Being “mature” and “an adult” doesn’t mean you have to completely abandon the things that made you happy when you were younger. It just means that you may have to approach them in a different way. 

gendercensus:

[ Link ]

It’s open until 1st March 2018, it’s open to people in any country, and last year we got about 10,000 participants – you can see the results here.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a blog post summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, retweet this tweet, boost this Mastodon post, and share by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks like Facebook. Every share is extremely helpful – it’s what helped us get 10,000 responses last year.

Thank you so much!

scornandivory:

island-delver-go:

Here is a picture of a single atom

Zoomed in even further

Source

anarkisses:

thank-you-based-bear:

Let’s pay our respects to Dragoljub from Belgrade who came to save the day with some sick educational stuff:

Floor’s cold there my dudes

magpiesyousharply:

frosty-the-snowden:

glitterarygetsit:

profmeowmers:

My bros I have been doing a lot of
reading about Wacky WWII Hijinks lately and I want to tell you a
story because I love it okay

once upon a time there was a dude in
Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol
hated him some goddamn fascists.

See Spain had recently ended its civil
war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in
Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy
buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty
bullshit

so soon after war breaks out Pujol
travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on
the Nazis for you”

“who the fuck are you?” say the
British, and kick him out

but Pujol is not deterred! He still
wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German
embassy instead. “hey” he
says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”

“yeah
okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”

and
just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German
intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and
such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his
way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later
writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England

Pujol
had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon
public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books
and set about just wholesale making shit up

this
is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely
did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were
basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen,
because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of
wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so
that’s probably the same right?

Here
is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves
this. “wow this dude is a
great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been
the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new
awesome spy that the British start to get worried

you
see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly
unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by
reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio
transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and
reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England.
The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by
parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept
the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed
in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies

so
there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a
prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as
double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking
up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great
spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail

“oh
shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they
have to and from this mysterious super spy.

“hey
wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending.
“someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”

At
this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the
British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally
an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t
interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again.
It wasn’t until MI5 started
asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we
know that guy”

so in
1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially
becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case
officer so he can start making up even better bullshit

and he
does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d
recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to
disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+
sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK

none of these people actually exist

Pujol
just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of
their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of
MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but
ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive
in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy
network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents

Pujol,
now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a
huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge
intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of
attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation
Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII
Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended

crazily
enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent.
After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which
require personal authorization from Hitler), and a
Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)

unable
to resist being totally fucking ridiculous,
Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this
time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own
death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”

and
that’s exactly what he did. Juan Garcia Pujol died in 1988, at the
age of 76

Okay I’m just editing my reblog to add this picture of Juan Pujol Garcia because I feel that it adds so much to the story to picture him doing ALL THE ABOVE with this expression:

What a legend.

Weaponized foreign shitposting

this is my favorite post in a very, very long time.