Now, by fake I mean: the alligator wasn’t real, it was put there as a prank by some Youtubers, to record people’s reactions. So the guy a) survived, and b) reacted as he would (AKA: fought a fucking alligator to save his friend) had it been real, because neither of them knew it wasn’t.
To quote Snopes: It appears that the “elbow drop” move was actually a real, good-faith, and quite courageous response to an uncomfortably realistic and relatively low-effort prank
Ok but like…. that still doesn’t change the fact that this absolute legend genuinely thought an alligator was about to eat his friend and he ELBOW DROPPED the fucking thing to save him!!!! That’s some true ass friendship right there
No people or animals got hurt, guy got to try and elbow drop an alligator, and his friend got to find out just how ride or die his friend is. As far as I’m concerned this makes the whole thing better.
I used to have geese so here’s a tip for everyone:
If a goose is attacking you, don’t run. No matter what, stand your ground. They can fly but when they’re mad, they don’t usually try to fly. Hold your hands in front of you, ready to grasp. When the goose gets close, grab it by the neck bit closest to the head and squeeze. Not tight enough to choke the goose, but tight enough so they can’t break free. You can hold them until they calm down or just do the next step right away. The next step is literally just to chuck them as far as possible and run for your life. It makes the goose know you’re in charge and you have a better chance of getting away. Trust me I’ve done this so many times that I’ve lost count
I can’t tell if this is a shitpost or actual advice. But I do know geese are the fucking worst.
type in “http” in the search bar and “https” under the ‘replace’ box
hit “all”
now your theme will allow you to save
?????
hell site
if the theme already has a few https links in it, you may have to put an addittional step in, as the instances of “https” already there will change to “httpss”. So if after you follow this guide and it still doesn’t work, search “httpss” and replace with “https” and it should finally work!
we’re almost in the ‘20s and dadaism is thriving, europe’s in a shambles, everyone is broke and the right wing is on the rise so i guess we really don’t learn a goddamn thing huh
It doesn’t rule my life, but it used to. Knowing that I have the capacity for that kind of thought is exactly why it doesn’t rule my life like it used to. I’m perfectly aware that I’m going to have that capacity forever, as studies have shown that Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is genetic (if you have a parent with OCD, as I do, you have a fifty-fifty chance) and is caused by abnormal brain circuitry, which means you’re stuck with it. And I am okay with that. I’ll survive. Recently, readers have asked me a lot how I learned to control it, so this is my story.*
*with the obvious warning that I am not a therapist and you are not me and I am not you and this is just my story your mileage may vary.
I was an anxious child. OCD and anxiety play very well together, and back then, I didn’t really know what was happening. I was a twitchy creature of secret rituals.
The first thing that helped me was when I realized that my obsessions weren’t normal. Not everyone felt this way. And not all thoughts had to feel this way, either.
The second thing that helped me was realizing that OCD didn’t really look the way it looked on television. Obsession could be about germs or cracks in the sidewalk, but really, it turns out that I can obsess about all kinds of things.
The third thing that helped me was figuring out that my compulsions weren’t always straightforward. Sometimes they were directly related to the obsession:
Tags in shirts —–> change clothing eleven times a day
tweets —–> refresh the screen every twelve seconds
Others, not so much:
Dying before making a mark —-> replacing all other activities like eating and sleeping with research, acquisition, and practicing of a new musical instrument
Datsuns —-> i don’t even know how i ended up with a datsun but i resent that entire chapter of my life
When my OCD was in control of me, it changed the way I looked at the world. Example. Here is life:
Life is always full of both bad and good things. Also trees. There will always be disasters and miracles happening in tandem. Mental illness changes the way you see it, though. For instance, a depressed person:
A content person:
The good or bad things don’t go away. You just point your gaze in a different direction. You are able to minimize some things and expand on others. When I got obsessive thoughts, they shifted my gaze onto something and held it there. It didn’t have to be something huge. It could have been about if my hair was dirty, or if I had said a prayer correctly, or if I had the precise same amount of air in each of my car’s tires.
In my head, the thought, whatever it was, became all encompassing.
It didn’t matter what else I tried to do, my mind would return to it. It became everything, my whole world, looped again and again and again.
I don’t even know if those are what lady bugs look like. I guess that’s okay. It’s a metaphor. They are only what I imagine ladybugs to look like, and my obsessive thoughts are not real thoughts, either. They aren’t really me. They are something my brain does to process stress and uncertainty and decision-making.***
***this took me a long time to figure out. More in a bit.
My personal breakthrough came when I decided that I would give myself rules. I was a champion with rules. I was a champion with rituals. I was a champion with things that involved numbers and counting and generally being compulsive. So my rule was that if I caught myself thinking about something obsessively, the timer began.
I would tell myself I could obsess for a certain number of minutes, and then I had to do something else until a designated time when I was allowed to obsess over it again. I could obsess for ten minutes. Then I had to put it down completely for thirty minutes. Then I could have another ten minutes. Then I had to put it down for two hours. Then I could have another ten minutes. I wasn’t allowed to act on any of the thoughts, either.
I told myself a rule was a rule. I couldn’t cheat on the time. And when I put it down, I had to really mean that I was putting it down. Did I want to be free or not?
And it began to work. I began to be able to reward myself with less and less obsessing time.
And then the really amazing thing happened, the thing that changed my life. Once I had spent enough time disciplining my obsessive thoughts, I realized … they weren’t really my thoughts. They were markedly different in character from my ordinary thoughts. The further I got from them, the more I realized that they were mental illness, not me, and moreover, that I could be free of them if I wanted to be. All I had to do was identify a thought as obsessive when it first appeared:
And then give it the time it deserved:
And I got better and better at it. I still sometimes have to give myself three minutes, especially when under stress. I still have to sometimes remove myself from a physical location to give myself those three minutes. And sometimes I still end up with a Datsun. But mostly, I just live my life, and it’s invisible.
So much of it is knowing that it’s the place your brain goes to under stress. Knowing that you can be out from under it. Knowing that ladybugs don’t really look like that. I just googled them and it turns out they have an entire additional segment in front of that black bit where the head goes which means I just drew an entire flock of headless ladybugs.
A small tip: if your characters have a traumatic experience, and they have nightmares about it, more often than not, those dreams will not be a play by play of what happened, but will often hold symbolism to the event than the actual event itself
These dreams can often not be genuinely scary but can leave you feel shaken and unrested when you do wake up. It may take your characters hours to let go of the feeling
It is also common to have the same dream roccur often. It might be unsettling enough that your characters will try to avoid sleeping for as long as they can, or will they to self medicate in some way to try to make the dream go away
A common reoccurring dream I had after my mom died was I would be watching her die, similar to how she did, but it was faster, and then we had her cremated. But the next day [in the dream] she would be back on the couch, just like any other day, as if she had not died the day before. But then futher on into the dream she would slowly start to decinigrate into ashes, but it would be ten times slower and it would be like losing her all over again
I would sleep completely through the dream and not wake up in some cold sweat or hyperventilating, tho that’s not to say that’s never happened before , but the next morning I would be shaken when I did wake up and it took me hours to get back to normal. I had that same dream several times over the last few years, and it still makes me shaken, but not to that same extent as the first time. That can happen over time with desensitization
Flashbacks work the same way. They’re not often a perfect play by play of what happened, but can be flashes of what happened. Or it can not be visual at all
You have five senses, and certain tastes or smells or sounds or touch can be just as impactful as visual flashbacks. For the most part, unless you have a disability that prevents otherwise (like being d/Deaf, or blind), all five of those senses are working together at the same time and each can carry their own weight in trauma
Especially when traumatic things are happening, adrenaline is rushing through you, or you are in a high stress situation. Parts of you are processing things faster than other parts of you. Your brain is working to take in everything that is happening and sometimes things are not always remembered correctly
I’ve seen/heard stuff from this with friends of mine with PTSD (theirs was mostly due to childhood trauma, mostly abuse, but this can occur from traumatic events at any point in life) and mysel. I’m going to mostly add on the…idk, ways of how these things manifest in different people? It’s by no means a comprehensive list or anything, just a few more examples.
A friend of mine for a long time would refuse to sleep for DAYS. He would generally go four or five (occasionally six, that was always really awful for those of us who cared about this kids wellbeing) before crashing. He found that if he was collapsing-exhausted, he wouldn’t have nightmares. That’s all that mattered to him at that point. He would drink lots of coffee and energy drinks, but he screwed up his sleep schedule enough to not need it as much as you would think, often not needing much until day three and beyond. But the rest of us saw how it was effecting the rest of his life and mental/physical health. We’re (friends, foster dad, and therapist) still working on getting this coping mechanism to change. It’s gotten better, but whenever something stresses him out too much or triggers the nightmares, it’ll start again.
Another friend would have nightmare cycles, almost like those mentioned above. He would have various alteration nightmares fixated on a certain horrible memeory from childhood (and unfortunately, there were plenty of those). He didn’t manage to the not sleeping for days on end thing like the other friend, but he never slept well. Eventually, with my offering to be a listener, he started writing them down stream of consciousness style when he woke up and text them to me. He found that the writing it down and sharing it with a trusted friend (me) that some of the cycles of nightmares would stop. Unfortunately, they were generally replaced with a new cycle of memory-based nightmares. The only way that he truly started getting better was after a long period of therapy and personal healing. These things take time, and if you’re writing these sorts of things fictionally, don’t make it automatically go away cause unfortunately it doesn’t happen like that.
And other friends sleep was cat naps. A very light sleeper, who could somehow sleep anywhere and everywhere if it was quite. But it was rarely deep enough sleep to dream, and too broken up throughout the day and night to be solid. This friend wasn’t quite as bad, but he was consistently more tired than most people, even if he wasn’t as bad as the aforementioned two.
In myself, my trauma (not abuse in my case, but other childhood bass trauma) related sleeping probels manifested as insomnia at an early age (seventh grade for me). For years I rarely got more than five hours of sleep. And fortunately, a solid five hours was enough for me to have a normal day and function. But that was a fragile balance. Anytime I got stressed or worried about things, my sleep tended to be less, or more broken up. The past handful of months, I’ve been sleeping a little more (I seem to be averaging 7 hours now), but the quality of sleep is still consistenct with how it’s been for years. (Also, keep in mind that there is a huge difference between laying in bed for 8+ hours and only getting 5 hours of sleep, and being up and moving and then only getting 5 hours.)
Additionally, there’s lots of resources on reputable psychology websites about things related to trauma. PTSD is a more widely known and much better understood disorder (in most cases) than many, due to its common prevalence and the active research on it. And how there seems to be a little less stigma against it then things like, say, Bi-polos disorders or DID. So research will go a long way.
