We are a small Canadian stim toy business run by two autistic women.
Many places that sell stim toys are focused on the needs and experiences of parents of young autistic children. Here at FlappyHappy, autistic needs and voices are centred over caregivers. Our goal is to focus on autistic adults since so many shops market towards children and it can feel infantalizing. Our stim toys are also great for people living with trauma, ADHD, chronic pain, anxiety, or other needs! We want you to know that it’s okay to stim. It’s more than okay actually! If you benefit from stim toys, then they are for you!
We carry a mixture of your usual stim toys but also more discreet stim items like jewellery! We also carry our own array of handmade items that you can’t get anywhere else!
It means so much to us if you share this post or otherwise spread the word about us.
We also offer free worldwide shipping on orders of $70 CAD or more.
Some of my favorite words and phrases to describe a character in pain
coiling (up in a ball, in on themselves, against something, etc)
panting(there’s a slew of adjectives you can put after this, my favorites are shakily, weakly, etc)
keeling over (synonyms are words like collapsing, which is equally as good but overused in media)
trembling/shivering (additional adjectives could be violently, uncontrollably, etc)
sobbing (weeping is a synonym but i’ve never liked that word. also love using sob by itself, as a noun, like “he let out a quiet sob”)
whimpering (love hitting the wips with this word when a character is weak, especially when the pain is subsiding. also love using it for nightmares/attacks and things like that)
clinging (to someone or something, maybe even to themselves or their own clothes)
writhing/thrashing (maybe someone’s holding them down, or maybe they’re in bed alone)
crying (not actual tears. cry as in a shrill, sudden shout)
dazed (usually after the pain has subsided, or when adrenaline is still flowing)
wincing (probably overused but i love this word. synonym could be grimacing)
doubling-over (kinda close to keeling over but they don’t actually hit the ground, just kinda fold in on themselves)
heaving (i like to use it for describing the way someone’s breathing, ex. “heaving breaths” but can also be used for the nasty stuff like dry heaving or vomiting)
gasping/sucking/drawing in a breath (or any other words and phrases that mean a sharp intake of breath, that shite is gold)
murmuring/muttering/whispering (or other quiet forms of speaking after enduring intense pain)
hiccuping/spluttering/sniffling (words that generally imply crying without saying crying. the word crying is used so much it kinda loses its appeal, that’s why i like to mix other words like these in)
stuttering (or other general terms that show an impaired ability to speak — when someone’s in intense pain, it gets hard to talk)
staggering/stumbling (there is a difference between pain that makes you not want to stand, and pain that makes it impossible to stand. explore that!)
recoiling/shrinking away (from either the threat or someone trying to help)
pleading/begging (again, to the threat, someone trying to help, or just begging the pain to stop)
Feel free to add your favorites or most used in the comments/reblogs!
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
Might I add:
The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed
The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child
The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship
The adventures of a space roomba
Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)
I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head
hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):
What about the one with the princess locked in a tower learning to become a wizard? That’s lived in my mind for years and I haven’t seen it in a long time
I can hardly take any credit for these stories! But I love sharing them. Unfortunately I cannot read all the prompt responses so please tag me if you want me to reblog a story that resonated with you so I can give it a little boost :)
I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh… look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn’t been updated in nine years, and there’s an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it’s fantastic.
Seriously, if you think that your choices are either “grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription” or “support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience”, I guarantee that it’s because you’re working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.
Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that’s really the only reason people are still recommending it. It’s kind of like if people were saying “hey, the iPhone 14 isn’t your only smart phone option!” but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that’s just newer and better – please don’t get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!
All I will add is: WRITE THOSE BREAKFAST SCENES if you want to, they can be absolutely critical in getting a handle on your characters. Or even on the setting. Write them all to fuck. Go hogwild.
Then cut them. They’re for you, and for the characters. Not the readers.
Lo these many years ago, in an elevator at some convention or other, Larry Niven gave me some of the best writing advice ever:
“You can always burn it.”
Go ahead and write that stuff. The breakfasts, the staring-into-empty-space scenes, whatever. Then pull them out of your work if they serve too little useful purpose. If you feel the need, shove such material into a separate folder to examine for possible usefulness later.
Even if you don’t put it where other people can see it, no writing is ever wasted. Every sentence will teach you something. But if a passage or sequence doesn’t help illuminate character, build the world, or advance the plot, get it the hell out of your narrative.
Your readers’ time is precious. Do them the courtesy of not wasting it.
The above is true, but I will also add one more thing:
You will not please all readers all of the time.
Different people will have emphatically fucking different opinions about whether that breakfast scene was necessary, important, or worthwhile. Tolkien spends a lot of time describing the landscape and you can put people in a room and watch them have knock-down bloody fist fights about whether this is of immense literary value or whether this is why Lord of the Rings is unreadable.
They’re both right. Objectively correct answers to that don’t exist.
I have a friend who finds My Neighbour Totoro unwatchable. To them, the pacing of that movie is literal torture, and there was a point in our lives that they looked at me and went “can we please watch something else I would literally rather do my taxes.” I am absolutely sure a bunch of people reading this just choked on something and want to go fight my friend. I think my friend is wrong. But also, my friend is 100% right.
I have personally had both someone bitch about the absolutely appallingly slow pacing in one of my stories and then other people cite the exact same scenes as their favourite thing in the world and the reason they reread constantly. And thank me for not rushing, for giving those details, for filling things in.
Both of those people are right, I just don’t care to write with one of them in mind.
Context matters, too. To the person in the original thread, here and now, that 15 minutes describing Starbucks is agonizingly painful; a hundred years from now a historian might read or play that description to their colleagues or a historical fiction author might put exactly the same description in a novel and it will have people utterly fucking rapt.
Context is everything, and so is audience. What is “good” pacing will depend on your context and your audience.
This is a giant pain in the ass! Because it means that part of nailing down the skill of pacing is nailing down who your audience is, and whether you’re reaching them, and how to find out from them if you’re succeeding, and also if this is the audience you want to be writing for. If this is the writer you want to be.
But it means that’s another reason to write that scene if you want to write that scene: because you literally won’t know if it’s a scene to keep until afterwards, anyway.
We all know what I mean! The “zing” when the character’s faces are get close enough must come unexpected (but) when both of them are looking for romance/comfort.
For example:
Tripping over each other in the hallway
Person A covering their face with their hands and Person B prying them off, their eyes meeting…
Sitting next to each other in the library, elbows touching, and they happen to turn around to face each other…
Find a natural way to bring your characters the romantic atmosphere!
#2 Noticing the Other Person
It’s natural to to see someone in a different way when there’s romantic vibe pulsating in the air. Maybe your character notices that their crush has a speck of green in their eyes they didn’t notice before.
#3 Build Ups
Describe how the characters feel moments before their lips touch. This includes things like racing hearts, sweaty palms, unsteady breathing. etc.
#4 Feeling all Self-Conscious
If you’re writing a first-person POV or want to portray the nervous excitement of kissing a love interest for the first time, you can afford to have your character be distracted by how they feel inside, or worrying about how they smell/look, etc.
Maybe they feel like it’s too early in the relationship to kiss
They’re still thinking about that annoying math problem
Did I apply my new cherry-flavored chapstick? etc.
This should come in the same beat as the “notice the other person”, heightening the romance tension between the characters.
Once they get closer and the kiss actually happens, these worries will melt away!
#4 Describing the Details
In most cases, it’s best to keep things understated (especially in regards to tongues)
tongues cannot “tangle” or “battle” or “swish around”…please, no.
Focus on the lips and how the characters move (like hugging, pushing the other against a wall, breathing, etc.), adding the tongue as an afterthought.
Don’t get too exicted about taste.
No, her tongue didn’t taste like fresh roses and peaches, unless she was eating peach candy right before the kiss.
Focus on other sensations other than taste: especially touch, heat. the tickle of his breath on her cheekc, etc. Or even the smell of shampoo.
#5 The Pullaway + Reaction
Does the kiss end naturally, or does something else interrupt them?
How do the characters react: do they blush, say something, hug he other person, or run away with a deep blush? For couples, they can even tease the other.
@betterbemeta are you able to translate this? Is it true horses can see netherbeings?? Will we ever know the extent of their powers???
I think I have reblogged this before but I’ll answer it again bc its a fascinating answer I feel and i was more funny than informational last time.
The truth is that horses see what they think are nether beings, I guess. They have a perfect storm of sensory perception that, useful for prey beings, marks false positives on mortal danger all the time. Which is advantageous to a flight-based prey species: running from danger when you’re super fast is much ‘cheaper’ than fighting, so you waste almost nothing from running from a threat that’s not there. Versus, you blow everything if you don’t see a threat that is there.
Horses also have their eyes positioned on the sides of their heads, which gives them an incredible range of peripheral vision almost around their entire body with only a few blind spots you can sneak up on them in. But this comes at the cost of binocular vision; they can only judge distance for things straight ahead of them. Super useful for preventing predators sneaking up from the sides or behind, but useless for recognizing familiar shapes with the precision we can.
Basically we now have a walking couch with anxiety its going to get attacked at any second, that can see almost everything, but mostly only out of the corner of its eye. It has a few blind spots and anything that suddenly appears out of them is terrifying to it. Combine that with that it actually has far superior low-light vision than us, and that its ears can swivel in any directions like radar dishes, and you’ve basically given a nervous wreck a highly accurate but imprecise danger-dar.
To be concise: all horses, even the most chill horses, on some level believe they are living in a survival horror.
This means that you could approach it in a flapping poncho and if it can’t recognize your shape as human, they mistake you for SATAN… or you could pass this one broken down tractor you’ve passed 100 times on a trail ride, but today is the day it will ATTACK… or your horse could feel a horsefly bite from its blind spot and MAMA, I’VE BEEN HIT!!!… or you could both approach a fallen log in the woods but in the low light your horse is going to see the tree rings as THE EYE OF MORDOR.
However, they actually have kind of a cool compensation for this– they are social animals, and instinctively look towards leadership. In the wild or out at pasture, this is their most willful, pushy, decisive leader horse who decides where to go and where it’s safe. But humans often take this role both as riders and on the ground. They are always watching and feeling for human reactions to things. This is why moving in a calm, decisive way and always giving clear commands is key to working with this kind of animal. Confusing commands, screaming, panic, visible distress, and chaos will signal to a horse that you, brave leader are freaked out… so it should freak out too!
On one hand, you’ll get horses that will decide that they are the leader and you are not, so getting them to listen to you can be tough– requiring patience and skill more than force. On the other hand, a good enough rider and a well-trained horse (or a horse with specialized training) can venture into dangerous situations, loud and scary environments, etc. calmly and confidently.
The joke in OP though is that many horses that are bred to be very fast, like thoroughbreds, are also bred and encouraged to be high-energy and highstrung. Making them more anxious and prone to seeing those ‘demons.’ All horses in a sense are going to be your anxious friend, but racehorses and polo ponies and other sport horses can sometimes be your anxious friend that thinks they live in Silent Hill.
Reblogging some horse knowledge for certain people who write fantasy books but know nothing about horses *cough cough*
reblogging for the line “Basically we now have a walking couch with anxiety”.
Also: horses have very limited depth perception. You know that thing where you out your finger on the bridge of your nose and it disappears because it’s behind your field of vision? Now imagine your nose is as long as a horse’s. The blind spot in front of a horse’s nose is huge, four to six feet or so. When a horse jumps, it can’t see the fence, it has to be trained / remember to look for it and remember where it is and how high. They cannot tell if that is a spot of oil or a black hole in the road. It’s probably a black hole. Better avoid it.
Horses can’t see your hand, they smell the treat (and use very sensitive skin/whiskers to feel.) Some horses are garbage at doing this gently, just absolutely awful, but remember - they can’t see what they’re doing.
Horses also have partial color vision - they see horse relevant colors. Blue, yellow and therefore green. No red derived colors. If you want to see an anxious couch have a bad trip, ride it in an arena with alternating sections of purple and yellow seating. Grey grey YELLOW YELLOW HOLY SHIIIIIIIT. Every single horse would walk past the purple seats and go OH MY FUCK at the yellow ones. This is why the bright red (grey) bucket isn’t a problem, but oH my FfffffffffSHIttTTTT do they notice a stray yellow plastic grocery bag.
Last statement here is, instinct tells a horse that anything clinging to your back is going to eat you. That we spend so much effort convincing them otherwise is amazing and in general a testament to the human race’s commitment to Bad Ideas.
[ID: A photo of a horse from the perspective of the rider. Top and bottom text reads: “I dont need a smartphone to find invisible monsters, I have a thoroughbred”
ALT