reads

staranise posted: Here's how you fix The Princess Bride: You make Buttercup a poet.

Did you know The Princess Bride needed fixing? I didn't, until we did an unauthorized unlicensed live performance of it as my high school play. I got to direct and choreograph all the fight scenes. For months, I lived and breathed that play. I got to know all the plot holes (How does Inigo know Buttercup is the man in black's true love? How does Westley know Buttercup and Humperdinck never said their vows?) and I also got to know the biggest hole, the enormous gaping void in the centre of the story. It's Buttercup. I've never been able to un-see it.

3 mental health articles via sciatrix that I saw my wife reading over my shoulder:

Gratitude Lists Are B.S. — It Was an "Ingratitude" List That Saved Me by Liz Brown at Good Housekeeping

Gratitude lists didn't help me one bit. Writing them was a practice that drove me deeper into shame and self-loathing when I was already in a very dark place. Gratitude lists imply that those of us who are in pain are choosing misery and just aren't working hard enough and that if we just think happy thoughts we'll float up above our problems like the kids in Peter Pan.

Listening to Estrogen: Hormones have always been a third rail in female mental health. They may also be a skeleton key. by Lisa Miller at The Cut

A tiny group of mainly female psychiatrists working independently all over the world, from inside American universities and organizations like the National Institute of Mental Health to researchers working as far away as Switzerland and Spain, began to study these women. They believe that in some, the dramatic fluctuations in hormones that accompany the onset of menopause may help to trigger schizophrenia. This correlation is called “the estrogen hypothesis.”

The Stuttering Doctor's 'Monster Study' By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS, MARCH 16, 2003 at The New York Times Magazine

In the fall of 1938, Wendell Johnson recruited one of his clinical psychology graduate students, 22-year-old Mary Tudor, who was avid but timorous, to undertake exactly that experiment. She was to study whether telling nonstuttering children that they stuttered would make it so. Could she talk children into a speech defect? The university had an ongoing research relationship with an orphanage in Davenport, Iowa, so Johnson suggested she base her study there. And thus, on Jan. 17, 1939, Mary Tudor drove along the high, swooping bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River to the Soldiers and Sailors Orphans' Home. She toted notepads, chalkboards, a Smedley dynamometer (to measure hand strength) and a cumbersome Dictaphone. The study she began that morning is now the subject of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the State of Iowa and the University of Iowa.

(gratuitous?) bunny icon post + redemptive bunny content

Because our bunnies are dwarf angoras (two groups that each independently need more protein), they have higher protein requirements than your average bunny and the only bunny pellet food we could easily get to meet their requirements was pretty expensive, so it's not surprising that they think it's delicious. They usually prefer the fresh produce part of their salads to bunny kibble, but they have been known to shove aside fresh greens to get to it first.

So yesterday when I found uneaten kibble in both bowls I wondered if I'd just given them too much salad, or if the herbs were too aromatic or something... but today when I found uneaten kibble in both bowls again I realized something was wrong... and as I stared at the kibble bowls it gradually dawned on me that the kibble was ... the wrong shape.

I had accidentally given them cat kibble instead of bunny kibble?! 😱

I mean, I have no memory of this so I obviously did it with my brain turned on autopilot. They still ate all their salad, and as far as I can tell they didn't touch the cat kibble, no ill effects were detected and they (surprisingly enough) didn't even seem that offended by its presence in their bowls - unlike the first time I tried to give them valerianella locusta or the plant known as "corn salad,[3] common cornsalad,[4] lamb's lettuce,[3] mâche[3] (/mɑːʃ/), fetticus,[3] feldsalat,[3] nut lettuce,[3] field salad, and rapunzel." That time they both ran away from the food bowls and sat up on their shelves glaring down at them. Rowan thumped when he ran away, and then sat on his shelf thumping until I removed his salad bowl and sorted all the rapunzel (we'll go with rapunzel) out from the other vegetables to allow him to pick and choose. Japp returned to the bowl faster and eventually deigned to nibble. By the morning they had both nonetheless finished it all and they now eat it semi-regularly.

To return to the subject line, after I uploaded icons with my sketches of Snookums and the BB¸ I thought I needed a bunny icon, but I lost a fair amount of time making (extra) candidates. Ultimately I gave this classic image of buns in a box to waxjism:



And then I uploaded ( 4 of Ro and 4 of Chief Inspector Japp for myself because they were so cute and it was so hard to decide????? )

The ones I didn't upload also include some of my favorite bunny photos such as ( Rowan looking like a near-perfect sphere of floof and Rowan looking like some mystical and wise forest creature from a Brian Froud picture. )

There aren't any un-uploaded ones of Japp because it was much easier to pick good photos that would obviously icon well of him: he's a chill little dude and is much more amenable to sitting for photoshoots. (Which is why he's a star and all my posts with the most notes are photosets of him - I think the one of him in the cardboard box and the one of him on the stool up there are the top two. If you don't count 2012's special edition Nut Kick candy bar.)