A/B/O dynamics is such a weird fantasy sex trope. Like you’ve got all these weird elements of mpreg, soul mating/bonding, biting/vampirism, sex pollen/pheremones/Pon Farr, lycanthropy/canine-like anatomy, strange genitalia, breeding kink, complicated gender relationships/imbalances…. and it’s all customizable and everyone does it different, but somehow it’s still comprehensible to fic writers/readers we all just decided a few years ago to roll with it and write it into thousands of fics. Good job folks, it’s so weird but it works
ChrisEvans: Dodger has a lion that he loves dearly. He brings it to bed every single night. Yesterday, my buddy Josh bought him a new lion for Xmas.It immediately caused competition and uncertainty. Dodger was torn. The big question was who would get the highly coveted bedtime invite?🎄🦁
A research tip from a friendly neighborhood librarian!
I want to introduce you to the wonderful world of subject librarians and Libguides.
I’m sure it’s common knowledge that scholars and writers have academic specialties. The same is true for subject librarians! Most libraries use a tool called Libguides to amass and describe resources on a given topic, course, work, person, etc. (I use them for everything. All hail Libguides.) These resources can include: print and ebooks, databases, journals, full-text collections, films/video, leading scholars, data visualizations, recommended search terms, archival collections, digital collections, reliable web resources, oral histories, and professional organizations.
So, consider that somewhere out there in the world, there may be a librarian with a subject specialty on the topic you’re writing on, and this librarian may have made a libguide for it.
Are you writing about vampires?
- Duquesne University has a guide on Dracula
- University of Northern Iowa: Monsters and Religion
- Fontbonne University has a particularly good one on Monsters, Ghosts, and Mysteries
- Washington University in St. Louis: a course guide on Monsters and Strangeness
How about poverty?
- Michigan State: Poverty and Inequality with great recommended terms and links to datasets
- Notre Dame: a multimedia guide on Poverty Studies.
Do you need particular details about how medicine or hygiene was practiced in early 20th century America?
- UNC Chapel Hill: Food and Nutrition through the 20th Century (with a whole section on race, gender, and class)
- Brown University: Primary Sources for History of Health in the Americas
- Duke University: Ad*Access, a digital collection of advertisements from the early 20th century, with a section on beauty and hygiene
You can learn about Japanese Imperial maps, the American West, controlled vocabularies, Crimes against art and art forgeries, anti-Catholicism, East European and Eurasian vernacular languages, geology, vaudeville, home improvement and repairs, big data, death and dying, and conspiracy theories.
Because you’re searching library collections, you won’t have access to all the content in the guides, and there will probably be some link rot (dead links), but you can still request resources through your own library with interlibrary loan, or even request that your library purchase the resources! Even without the possibility of full-text access, libguides can give you the words, works, people, sites, and collections to improve your research.
Search [your topic] + libguide and see what you get!
This is…amazing. I am angry that I didn’t know about this until now. Now I can ~academically~ indulge my fascination with the 1918 flu pandemic? When I have organic chem homework and a lab report due tomorrow? I both love this and hate this.
I have terrible news.
At a quick glance, Christopher Newport University, Goodwin College, and Harford Community College all have libguides on the 1918 flu pandemic.
LibGuides are magic.
(also let us know if you find dead links, we can fix them!)
An even better way to search for libguides?
Use the libguide community site and search by topic, institution, or even your friendly neighborhood librarian! (If you have a librarian or two who you trust to put you on the right path, you might be able to get that guidance even if you don’t have time to reach out directly!) If their site says “LibGuide” it’ll show up in THAT community somewhere!
Looking to see what books are being used in a particular class in a particular university? Course specific libguides usually have those!
Interested in browsing until you find something that catches your attention? Springshare (the vendor that manages LibGuides) curates lists of interesting, amusing, and innovative libguides! (Okay some of these are boring because they’re geared towards UX and data visualization for librarians, but still…)
Interested in seeing the stuff that YOUR local or institutional librarians are trying to promote? Looking for ways to make the most of the resources that are freely available to you just down the road? Libraries from Atlantic City to Saratoga Springs to South Australia are making guides for their various resources, which describe everything from how to search databases to how to read call numbers to how to access online resources like e-books and video subscriptions!
Even major institutions like the New York Public Library have guides, on everything from genealogy to the history of New York neighborhoods!
When choosing an outfit you should ask yourself: “do I look like a character in an 80s movie, a fucking idiot or Gay”
If you have to say no to all three, your outfit sucks
Folk horror is a sub-genre of horror fiction characterized by reference to European pagan traditions. Stories typically involve standing stone circles, earthworks, elaborate rituals or nature deities, and draw on paganism and folklore. Examples include Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Children of the Stones, Witchfinder General, Robin Redbreast, and the defining folk horror movie, The Wicker Man.
Gentlemen, it has been a privilege being horny on main with you tonight
suctioning
Why
She had a dream and she realized it.
Hey wait but sit down
This is Megumi Igarashi
She’s a Japanese artist
Japan, the country with some of the most fucked up pornography and the penis festival
Where the vagina is basically illegal to talk about
So she did a bunch of art featuring 3D sculptures of her vagina, including this kayak, and was put in jail for it
She was indicted again in December on obscenity charges for selling vagina art to crowdfund for the kayak and could spend two years in prison
In Japan, women’s vaginas are treated as though they are men’s property. The trains here usually display pornographic advertisements. As a woman, I find that blatant objectification to be humiliating. I’m disgusted by it. My body belongs to me. So, with this project I wanted to release the vagina from the standard Japanese paradigm. Japan is lenient towards expressions of male sexuality and arousal, but not so for women. When a woman uses her body in artistic expression, her work gets ignored, and people treat her as if she’s some sex-crazed idiot. It all comes back to misogyny. And the vagina is at the heart of it. The vagina is ridiculed. It’s lusted after. Men don’t see women as equals—to them, women are just vaginas. Then they call my vagina-themed work “obscene,” and judge me according to laws written by and for men. [x]
She plans to turn her trial in to a manga comic. She seems pretty sure she’s not going to do any jail time but if you’d like to help her pay for her inevitable fine and court fees, you can check out her online store. There are little glow in the dark vagina characters.
blackmoonbabe
Wow I’ve seen this reblogged a ton of times without seeing the whole going to jail part.
dorkilybeautiful
Here’s a recent article about her from July of 2017. It looks like she did some brief time in jail, and is currently still working on this artistic effort, as well as trying to raise awareness about a new terrorism law and the jail/prison system in Japan.
Reblogging again for the updates!
I went from “wow why” to “YES GIRL” in 2 min.
IMAGINE BEING ATTRACTIVE LIKE HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE
Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
wow okay i’m crying now
“And even as he watched the rescue unfolding that morning, he would have understood that for the living, everything which could have been done had been done: not a single survivor was lost or injured being brought aboard the Carpathia. For those who had gone down with the Titanic, save for reverencing their memory at the service later that day, there was nothing more that he or anyone could do. Rostron’s duty now was as he always saw it: to the living.”
I looked up a bit about this because the post is so movingly written that when I read it aloud to my husband and mother they both wept like babies, and something else really struck me about this story.
So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.
So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.
And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.
All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind.
I dunno. That’s just really stuck with me.
armoured-escort
Cottam also ended up staying awake for something like 48 hours straight trying to send survivors messages and a list of survivors home, but due to Carpathia’s limited radio frequency range and with no other ships to act as a relay, this was rather patchy. However, he tried his damn best to make sure the survivor’s messages got home, and was also bombarded with incoming messages of bribes to spill the details of the disaster to the press.
Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.
He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.
In the face of extreme adversity, both men refused to do anything but their duty (and exceeding their duty) not just because Rostrum had ordered it, but because it was the right thing to do. They could have profited considerably from the disaster and they refused for the dignity of the survivors.
This is hopepunk. This is what we can be, what we are, when instinct takes over. This is what we are when we choose to care about each other. We’re not profit machines or units of production or lone fierce wolves in a bitter wilderness. We are people, and we care about people.
This is human nature. Don’t give up on it.
somethingoddinsod
Seriously.
I fell in love with the Carpathia’s story the moment I heard it. And I would LOVE to see it more well known.
reblog for noises
This makes me -extremely- uncomfortable
drtanner-sfw
I like how literally every other cat in the room is absolutely fine while this weird fucker is just YURRGLURRGLRRRYRRRRRing it up like a madman.
Why is he so upset. Who did this to him.