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Look for the Helpers

@aresmarked / aresmarked.tumblr.com

Birdhymns on AO3, blogging the way some quilt. (Mobile header image done by the lovely weissgrip, current avatar by the equally lovely seeyouguyslater.) TERFs ain't welcome.

apparently it's not enough that it's in the header

if you are not a supporter of trans folk, nonbinary folk, queer folk, two-spirited folk, or any other folk who bear a different name and a specific identity that springs from their culture, you are not a 'radical feminist' in any way, you're just enforcing the same old colonial gender expectations and you are not welcome here

sorry I make this post frequently but apple really doesn't get enough hate

so if you don't like them it's fine. I know a lot of people who are really mean to picky eaters about their preferences, and it doesn't actually help.

However, some people only think they hate apples because they've only tried the horrible mealy Red "Delicious" variety. If that's the case, you might be surprised by how much you enjoy a tastier variety. Honeycrisp and Cosmic crisp are some of the most popular apples and they are really good.

https://applerankings.com/ is a great, and wittily written, trove of apple reviews and information and will help you find nice apples. It is focused on apples available in the US, and idk where you are. I really miss discovery apples, which don't seem to be a thing this side of the Atlantic.

They can be a little pricey though. Obviously I don't know your personal situation, but if that's an issue, there might be local programs that can help. I don't know where you live, but here in Seattle there's a program called Fresh Bucks that gives people $40/month to spend on fruit and vegetables at local farmers markets. There might be something like that near you. Or, if you just really wanna try a really nice apple and it's not accessible to you, dm me and I can PayPal you something. I just want everyone to have the chance to have a nice apple from time to time.

Anyway, like I said, if you just truly don't like any apples, you are 100% valid and you shouldn't force yourself to eat something you don't like. Body autonomy includes not having to eat foods you hate. But I'd hate for you to go through life not knowing how much you could enjoy a high-quality apple, just because you've only experienced the worst apples.

oh snap I just realized op meant the phone company

no no keep talking

obligatory welcome guide for redditors

A lot of the guides I've seen don't actually seem to understand how reddit works in comparison to tumblr so

  • your blog is basically your own small subreddit. some people curate this heavily to fit a theme, like a sub, most people don't
  • reblogs are culturally equivilant to upvotes but functionally equvilant to crossposting
  • there is an algorithm. it sucks and nobody uses it. turn it off in settings. everything is generally chronological
  • likes are functionally equivilant to saving a post
  • you've probably already seen this but change your icon and put something in your bio or people WILL assume you're a bot. personal info not required
  • generally, anything you would put as a comment on a thread should go in the tags or the replies of a post. only add comments in reblogs if you want it to become part of the base post
  • tags are mostly equivilant to flairs, used for organization and commentary
  • your dashboard is an aggregation of everyone you follow
  • there is an r/all equivilant(trending page) but it sucks and nobody uses it
  • our search also sucks. your best bet is using tumblr.com/tagged/[TAG] and not /search
  • there are no mods
  • by extension, reporting something doesn't put it in front of the mods, it sends it to staff, who may or may not do anything(usually they don't)
  • there is no karma, there are no karma limits. anyone can reblog anything, comment/reply to anything, or post in any tag
  • "reposting"(reblogging) old content doesn't matter. people can and will reblog the same post multiple times, including in a row
  • CAVEAT. reposting someones art(NOT reblogging, making a new post) is a dick move. i know this is commonplace on fandom subs but its not necessary here. everything you post should be [OC] unless you are reblogging. or posting shitty memes
  • we have our own sitelore, you'll pick it up
  • (though im not opposed to bringing some over from reddit)
  • our app also sucks. we do not have third party apps and any that claim to be are scams. sorry
  • for desktop, most people use the XKit Rewritten extension for QoL improvements and to revert shitty aesthetic updates, much like old.reddit
  • we have no idea where the porn rules are at either. add a mature content flag to anything you'd get fired for looking at at work, that's about it

finally, from the bottom of my heart, fuck u/spez

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does anyone have any tips on how the heck you even pull this off? no retreating not only rules out surtr and all fast redeploys, it also demands that you not let a single unit die when isharmla is firing multiple blasts of huge damage with a massive range. how tf?

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So i got some people on this post suggesting that it only counts retreat deaths but manual retreating would be fine and NOPE. I tried a run where no one died but i still retreated a few people and it didn't count. They demand no deaths and no changes to your initial setup. Every unit you place down is there for the rest of the battle or you fail.

Finally did it today with this setup! i intended to have goldenglow next to kaltsit and thorns covering the right blue box but i ran out of deployment slots and you cant change anything under this restriction so oh well! lucky i had enough lifepoints that letting the few enemies go into the right box didnt matter.

FRANKY DEMOLITION TESTING MOMENTS

music is temporary (i had my winamp playlist going on in the bg) but im really enjoying how her moveset is shaping up so far. she's faster than susan but requires a lot more precision to use effectively. she'll have levels built exclusively for her on occasion if everything goes to plan.

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90% of AI art discourse on this site is people arguing over the precise shape/size/color of the bottle that we should put the proverbial genie back in. horses have long since left the barn on this one champ. nobody's belling that cat

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the remaining 10% is people comparing AI to asbestos and expecting me to take them seriously

Anyway, I agree with zoredaichaso's point. AI isn't going to be un-invented, but it can damn well be restricted from datamining and from being legally used for shit it shouldn't be used for.

it is certainly possible to make reading previously free text on the internet prohibitively expensive (see: the reddit API changes) but this tends to have consequences that are far and beyond the relatively minimal harm that is the text being used to train LLMs (see: the reddit API changes)

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Okay OKAY I wasn’t gonna propagandize the summer hikaru died but ive been thinking a little too much about it. SORRY I’ve been basically recommending a hundred different series. If you think my posts are all over the place you should see my brain. Anyways.

The THING about the summer hikaru died. The many things about it. That are getting to me. Number one the overwhelming feeling of SUMMER. Almost every page has the sound effects of cicadas or rain and sweat on everyone’s bodies. It’s so immersive, to me at least. It’s like it never lets you forget. A constant droning it feels like everyone has to speak a little louder to be heard. Something oppressive lives here, and it’s not just the eldritch horrors.

Number TWO. Grief. But in like that horror way. Mourning somebody no one else knows is gone. I’m just gonna say it bc it’s revealed in like the first 5 pages it’s body replacement. Some.. thing replaces the main characters best friend and it’s like. The twisting feeling in your gut looking at something that you should know but knowing it’s not the same anymore. It’s someone else. Look at this page I can’t stop thinking about it

[ID: A panel from Hikaru ga Shinda Natsu. Yoshiki sits with his head on his desk, drawn so his face and body are streaking down the page in smears of black. Around him float black text bubbles with scratchy text saying "To move on." Then he lifts his head with a gasp when someone exclaims, "Finally! There you are!" End ID]

That’s fucking GRIEF a sinking terrible grief. That nobody in their right mind could understand. But it’s also like. Christ it’s the mitsuba sousuke tbhk dilemma it’s that this new thing is it’s own person too. They aren’t the same but it’s damn near impossible to separate them because they look the same and act the same and desperately want to be the same. They want to be alive.

THREE. Cannot forget the queerness. The queer allegories and actual queerness are intense. Grotesqueness and horror at being different. Feeling like you know something is bad but you can’t help but enjoy it. Gut wrenching desire mixed in with every complicated feeling about losing your best friend while something pilots his body almost perfectly. It’s very fucked up. ALSO. Fear at being found out. Self hatred for being grotesque and different and not what everyone wants. Not what he wants.

Anyways uuuhhhh.yeah the summer hikaru died is fascinating to me. I love the feeling of it. Gives me chills. It’s cool 👍🏻 ALSO THE ART IS SO. GOOD. Haunting. I love it.

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look we all sing and praise phineas and ferb until the cows come home (and rightly so) but we are all absolutely sleeping on fetch with ruff ruffman.

the opening of season four is so entirely unhinged. his evil identical twin brother steals all his belongings (including his assistant chet the mouse) and sells them online for some reason and he has no more fancy pants so he can’t take the poodle next door charlene to the poodle ball and he gets a fax saying he’s fired but it’s signed as “ha ha” which his assistant supervisor blossom pepperdoodle von yum yum says is most likely just a joke but no ruff thinks that it’s from harriet hackensack who just bought their tv station and hates dogs so he decides that he is going to go to australia where she is to get his job back so his grandma buys him back his computer (and chet) from his evil brother and then blossom hands him a book that she wrote about converting your dog house into a car or submarine running in alternative fuel so they decide to harness the power of chinese food (oil) to convert the dog house which ends up looking like a chicken car and go to australia but they didn’t build a submarine so it starts to sink until they use a bunch of pineapples in a net to make the ship float then they encounter ruffs ancestor who’s a spoof on blackbeard and they escape attack because ruff tells him to go on his website on pbskids and play science games and then they discover that auditions for season 4 contestants were actually today and ruffs usual dog murray resigned and replaced himself with hank who is a bulldog so hank has to audition 3000 kids to be contestants on fetch then they accidentally eat the pineapple floating their ship and crash land on an island and it turns out it’s poodle island which is like alcatraz for dogs and they arrest ruff because they mistake him for his evil identical twin brother scruff and he escapes though a tunnel scruff dug after finding notes scruff wrote about hitting banks hard and then they finally make it to australia where ruff dresses as a cat and goes to talk to harriet it gets stuck in the cat costume and harriet kicks him out after hiring blossom who comes back and tells ruff that harriet hates dogs because a dog named murray stole her sled named rosebud when she was a child and that murray was ruffs old employee and ruff still has the sled but then it brakes and he gets a call from his nephew glen saying that he will give him his lugeing sled if he enters the world lugeing competition dressed as a troll and then he gets a call from his great uncle mcruffmantosh saying that he can’t because one of his ancestors a thousand years got in a fight with a norwegian ice fairy and cursed all rugfmans who get on a sled but ruff decides to do it anyway and names the sled the rosebud 2 and plans to dedicate his win to harriet so he can get his job back but surprise scruff his evil brother is also at the competition and reveals that he sold ruffs stuff to pay for luge training so he could break the norwegian ice fairy curse and they team up and come in dead last place but make history as the first ever canine luge team and harriet is very moved by their performance and ruff asks her for his job back and she says she never fired him so the whole throng was a joke the whole time fabricated by ruffs nemesis spot spotnick who bought ruffs fancy pants to take charlene the poodle next door to the poodle ball but ruffs pants are so fancy that they have a self destruct button and he destructs them and embarrasses spot and then they announce the contestants on the show. like. who pitched that.

(it’s all on youtube)

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😅 What's a story or scene you've created that you're a smidge embarrassed exists?

🥺 Is there a certain type of moment or common interaction between your characters that never fails to put you in your feels?

🤡 What's a line, scene, or exchange you've written that made you laugh?

😈 Has there been a point in a story where you did something just to be playfully mean to your readers?

✍ Do you have a beta reader?

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🎢 Which of your fics would you call your wildest ride?

✨ Give you and your writing a compliment. Go on now. You know you deserve it. 😉

💋 First kiss fics. Love em or hate em?

🎶 Do you listen to music while you write? What song have you been playing on loop lately?

🛠What tools/programs/apps do you use to write?

⛔ Do you have a fic you started, but scrapped?

🙋‍♀️ Do any irl people know you write fanfic?

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❌ What's a trope you will never write?

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it's easy to dunk on people with poor reading comprehension or to look down on them (consciously or not) even if you're not actively shaming them for "not getting it" or "being stupid" but it's not actually helpful. it's a worrying development that many people (particularly many young people) are becoming resistant to the idea that complex and/or challenging books have value but it's also an understandable development, because in many cases it's a reaction to being shamed for their struggles with literacy and not given the help they would've needed to develop an adequate level of literacy.

that's not even going into what should even be considered an "adequate" level of literacy to begin with, because the truth is that a lot of people will simply never be able to read better than absolutely necessary to navigate their daily life, and this shouldn't be treated as some kind of failure on their part. the goal of literacy education should be to give people the tools for self-sufficiency.

what's worrying is not that there are a lot of people who don't engage with complex texts, but that there are a lot of people who refuse to believe that there is something to be gained from engaging with complex texts. someone doesn't have to read or understand shakespeare or kafka or what-have-you in order to live a fulfilling life, but when they become resistant to the idea that a text can have something going on beyond what's immediately apparent on the surface, they become easy targets for deception. this hinders the self-sufficiency that literacy is supposed to provide them with.

the goal of you high school language class is not just to get you to analyze texts, but to introduce you to the idea that texts can be analyzed in the first place, even if you don't go on to be particularly good at actually analyzing them yourself. you don't need to be able to read between the lines to understand that it is possible to read between the lines, and that therefore a text that seems nonsensical to you at first may simply be written for an audience of a different skill level - this is only a problem if there is a mismatch between the complexity of the text and the literacy of its target audience. an inability to read for subtext is not a personal failure, nor does the ability to read for subtext make you a better person than someone who can't. literacy is a skill, and like any skill there are people to whom it comes more easily than others.

calling people who are drawn to anti-intellectual rhetoric due to their struggles with literacy stupid is not going to encourage them to change their mind. developing media literacy and reading comprehension is something that is very difficult to do on your own, and doubly so if any attempt at trying to learn is met with derision for not already being able to do it. the problem is not people who only engage with easy texts, the problem is people growing hostile towards the idea that there is worth in engaging with more complex texts

if reading comprehension has always come naturally to you, it can be difficult to grasp how someone can fail to understand a text that you thought was easy enough to follow. I myself am guilty of snapping at people for misinterpreting me so wildly it seemed like they were doing it on purpose. you need to learn to suppress this kneejerk reaction, and instead see this frustration as common ground: you are both facing a situation where your communication skills are insufficient. what can you do to bridge this gap? how can you present this information in different ways that better suit how the other party processes information? keep in mind that this does not necessarily mean to simplify the information, because nobody likes being condescended to, and being condescended to is in many cases exactly what made these people hostile towards more complex ideas to begin with.

I don't have an easy solution, because this is a complex problem, and what helps some people will inevitably be useless to many others. but I believe fostering a culture where you won't be met with derision or ridicule for not understanding something or needing more explanation will go a long way. next time someone comments on your post with an absolutely baffling take that makes you wonder if they even read what you said, consider that maybe they are trying to engage with a text that is above their reading level, and they genuinely lack the ability to parse and retain the information you presented in the way you presented it. if you're going to respond, try to do so in good faith.