Good for him
Love bombing is not a euphemism for "too much affection too soon," or "high desire for contact."
"Love bombing" is a term originally used in the context of cults to describe a deliberate and coordinated recruitment method that involved feigning friendship and interest in a potential recruit, via flattery, flirtation, physical affection, and very directed positive attention to everything the recruit says in order to lure them into the cult.
Since cults and abusive relationships operate in similar ways and use similar tactics, love bombing in an interpersonal relationship looks like manufacturing closeness in order to trap someone into a relationship in which the abuser has all the control.
And I know these days there's a million bullshit junky articles out there that make you think this is a symptom of cluster b personality disorders, but there is no way for you to be love bombing somebody without realizing it.
If you are an affectionate person and the level of affection and attention you give makes someone uncomfortable, you are not "accidentally" abusing them.
If you are uncomfortable with the level of affection and attention someone is paying you, they are not de facto abusing you.
Love bombing is about using someone's desire for human connection to fast track them into a situation you control that they will feel disinclined to leave.
if i touched a cactus it wouldn’t prick me. the spines would turn to felt under my fingers because it trusts me
the soyjak is a highly advanced psychosocial technology on the level of christ's forgiveness or the joint stock corporation. clear evidence of objective progress in this "fuzzy" area of technology -- if you brought the soyjak back to the early modern period you could use it to attain great power and wealth
This counts as a spell
So my husband is back on his medieval warfare and tactics special interest lately, and he was telling me about how so many battles were lost because the knights would just disobey orders and break ranks because they got too excited and just went full Leroy Jenkins. Prey drive switches on and they see somebody running and they just blank out and go.
Which seemed really dumb to me, like people couldn’t be that stupid, until I got walloped in the face by a memory from freshman year of college.
It’s almost 10pm in the dead of winter right before Finals, I’m out at college in a high altitude desert in the biggest city I’ve ever been in during my life. My dorm is on the second floor of one of the newest buildings, which are still surrounded by construction zones for the other new buildings going up. Just past the construction zones is one of the city’s major roads. There is still snow on the ground outside, the sidewalks are ice and rock salt, and the parking lot is a slush pile. (All of this is relevant in a minute I swear, stay with me here.)
We get a knock at the door. One of my roomies answers it. There’s 2 creepy looking muscle dudes asking for another roommate, E. E is creeped out and doesn’t want to go see them, but they won’t leave, insisting they see her and talk to her out in the hall. My spider senses are tingling, the social anxiety override kicks in, and I go full Mom Friend and ask them who they are and how they know her. And dudes just take off for the stairwell.
And I took off after them.
I need y’all to understand that I was an asthmatic at altitude in a mountain city in winter at night in shorts and a t-shirt and no shoes whatsoever, and I somehow made it down two flights of stairs, out the door, down the sidewalk, across a construction zone, across the parking lot, and halfway to the road screaming at two beardy dudebros twice my size to “get back here you little creeps”, all before I had consciously realized that I had left my apartment. Something about watching two creepy guys run for it triggered something in me, some latent instinct to Search and Destroy. Like Fight or Flight but I wasn’t the one being threatened, they were the ones doing the Flight, and I had this deep, ferocious need to FIGHT.
I full on blanked out, y’all. I literally have no memory of getting down the stairs or across the parking lot or anything at all until I was watching the headlights on the road thinking “wait, where are my shoes?” It’s a little black hole. I was in the apartment, they took off running, and then bam, there I was. It was like an out of body experience, I was hearing myself shout at them and thinking “I sound like such an idiot right now omg,” and then I realized What I Had Done.
Not only was it stupid, it was super dangerous. Even aside from all the environmental dangers, if they were some kind of kidnappers they could totally have snatched me. And yet there I was, barefoot in the snow and road salt with no phone, no inhaler, and I was still hollering after them like a dog on a chain when one of my roommates came down in boots and a coat to drag me back inside.
And honestly? I’m still miffed I never caught the guys. That was my takeaway from that incident.
So yes, I believe it now. People are so unbelievably dumb and the prey drive instinct is absolutely real.
Thoughts? I have had a few experiences like this before, and you seem the type to enjoy this story.
Yeah, this happened. Actually contributed toward the loss for the French at Agincourt.
It also contributed to Queen Zenobia’s loss to Aurelian’s legions at the battle of Emesa. Her infantry broke part of Aurelian’s lines and continued to pursue, drawing them out of formation and into flanking position by Aurelian’s reserves.
Ancient field-warfare relied very heavily on infantry maintaining formation, as a solid wall of heavy infantry like hoplites, phlangites, or legionaries lined up with weapons and shields ready was a formidable obstacle on any battlefield. One tactic was to try to goad them into breaking formation using archers, skirmishers, and other ranged units. Even though legionaries and hoplites and similar units wore heavy armor and bore heavy shields that were largely resistant to projectiles, lighter ranged troops might be able to piss them off enough to pull them out of formation and into a trap or flanking maneuver.
The first time I ever came face to face with a bear I was having a conversation with a roommate outside our rented house in Asheville north carolina. Its head popped up over the hood of my roommates van and we looked at each other and I think I said “… that’s a bear!”
Next thing I know I’m at a full sprint in my neighbor’s yard with an axe in my hand chasing the bear into the woods and I stopped and slid like a fucking cartoon character and said out loud to myself “what the FUCK are you doing?”
I honestly don’t think I had a conscious thought until some part of my brain realized that the bear was way faster than me and I wasn’t going to be able to catch up.
Exit pursuing a bear. Legend status.
Really. So much of army stuff is just teaching people to follow commands at all times, under all conditions. Because human beings are bad at that! (So are most other creatures, so it’s not a human thing per se.) This is the reason for drill, repetitive training, development of muscle memory, strict hierarchy, and insistence that you can’t question the chain of command no matter what.
This drive is so intrinsic that “this army is inexperienced, they’ll chase us if we run” or similar ruses were FREQUENTLY used to massive tactical advantage.
This is both useful reference for my writing and an absolutely hysterical set of anecdotes, so thank you all
The fight response, folks. Not just the obscure cousin of flight/freeze/feign death!
The fight response, folks.
Not just the obscure cousin
of flight/freeze/feign death!
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
THERE IS A PREQUEL, Y’ALL
WELLS ARE DEEP, OKAY
I really love the small change from “a well” to “her well”
she’s been down there for a year, it’s her damn well
Hey, it me!
There are actually two more paintings of Truth in the well painted by Gerome; one painted before all the others:
Truth at the Bottom of a Well, 1895
And one in between the two that have been already shared:
Truth is at the Bottom of the Well, 1895
Dude wasn’t exactly the most original when it came to his naming conventions, but he sure did paint a bad bitch.
Gérôme pitching one of his painting ideas to his friend: so you see…. there’s this….
His friend: please don’t say well
Gérôme: there’s this well
truly blessed to live somewhere I can log off, go outside and touch grass while still being surrounded by gay furry art
hey so maybe switching to threads, infamously managed by one of the worst data scraping companies of all time, isnt the play guys
heres just PART of what they're trying to track when you download the app:
to list what they attempt to track:
- unique identifier
- os version
- device brand
- charging status
- device total memory
- first name
- gps coordinates
- screen density
- app version
- device orientation
- headphone status
- rotation data
- network connection type
- city
- available internal storage
- device language
- os build number
- accelerometer data
- network carrier
- available device memory
- last name
- postal code
- email address
- gender
- system volume
- timezone
- app name
- country
- state
- screen resolution
- cookies
- device model
- birthday
- android advertising id
please for the love of God, dont download threads.
addendum: threads is so bad that it's literally banned in All Of Europe because it violates the GDPR, aka General Data Protection Regulation.
lady who picked up her laptop a minute ago gave me a little origami crow that was like a billion milligrams of dopamine directly into my brain
These are… actually pretty inspiring.
Cool.
Forever reblog.
“you are never taller than when you stand up for yourself”
thats just awesome
“You’re the result of 4 billion years of evolutionary success; F***ING ACT LIKE IT.”
My fave right there.
When life gets harder, you must have just leveled up.
Inspirational fucking post right there.
The last one is my favorite.
Always reblog Courage Wolf!
“Bottle your emotions. Molotov Cocktails.”
That was my life moto for a while
This is missing my personal fave so I’m just going to add it real quick.
Ah, the classics…
