I see you’re trapped in my gay and stupid maze again

This tweet had me absolutely flabbergasted twice because I read this and I was like "Dame Aylin? The tall, blonde, supermodel demigoddess? How is she at all outside of the beauty standard? This is stupid" and then I scrolled down and there were a hundred replies by straight dudes who were calling her ugly and talking about anime women they prefer

Two and a half years ago now, I made a 60 second video briefly discussing the lack of variety of body-types in female characters, and I made what I thought was a very gentle and restrained argument. I showed some pictures of Olympic-level female athletes and said "hey, if you're designing physically powerful characters, maybe this is a better reference point to start from than supermodels."

It went... unpleasantly viral, and still to this day it gets a dozen to a hundred comments per day, depending on how much the algorithm is pushing it. And they go basically like this:

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments like this, completely non-stop. I've removed the most heinous bigotry from the screenshots here (transphobia, racism, violent misogyny, etc), but they are all the same two or three arguments, the same thought-terminating clichés, regurgitated on auto-pilot, forever.

I think it's easy to underestimate just how deeply brain-poisoned culture is by the beauty standards that are pushed on us. There is this reflexive and instant disgust response in so many people at the mere suggestion that anything other than the beauty ideal could possibly be desirable. And it is disgust, because nothing else can produce such amounts of venom and moral judgment so fast.

The women that these people are all so offended by look like this, by the way:

From the photo collection Athlete by Howard Schatz, 2002

I thought was making a mild, inoffensive, milquetoast suggestion in my video. I wrote it thinking "okay, what's the broadest, most mainstream acceptable, gentlest, most non-controversial version of this argument I can make?"

But it turns out there is no gentle version of that argument you can make. The suggestion that women in particular could or should be anything other than idealized objects of beauty is a form of totalizing violence, an obscenity, to the sensibilities of a distressing number of people.

Thought Id repost my old art series from last year about my fae ocs i keep drawing again [ here 1 and here 2 ] 🌷🌷🌷 this story was drawn by me and written by @widdlefangs as a collab based on this prompt

Perhaps it was a memory, or just the vivid imagination of a lonely child. But he swore that there was a time he was a protector of the woodland realm. He wasn’t particularly special in any way or form, but one thing he did have was his undeniably vivid imagination. The conjured sight of a knight, a cricket, and their sparrow mount, kindly requesting him for his 1st grade home economics project. “What shall it be sir, that eases your heart in parting with your callalily treasure? Be it great or many, we are prepared to compensate you for such a loss,” said the knight. “Our Queen is gravely ill, and your flower is the only remedy,” he stutters, an aching worry deep-set in his eyes, “we folk do not usually take any thing that doesn’t belong to us…maybe borrow a little here and there… but as a token of our respect, we humbly ask for your permission. Thus, young one, what shall it be?”

Looking back, he could have asked for riches or the rarest jewels, but his young mind was bereft of that adult greed, instead he asked, “Take me with you then, let me give it to her myself.” ---

The flower was not particularly special in any way or form, he thinks. Just a bloom that is as beautiful as any other bloom. He follows the knight’s quickened footsteps as best as he can into the chamber of the Queen.

He did not even have the luxury of beholding the majesties of the realm around him.

There beyond the sheer curtains was, whom he assumed was the Fae King, the crown of ancient wood resting upon his troubled brow, and in his arms, the pale husk of a Queen. 

He falls to his knees and the King, in his worried state, wordlessly beckons for him to feed the bloom to the Queen. Laboriously, she takes the fragile petals between her cold lips. 

 She lays still for a moment, and perhaps a moment too long, until her chest rises, rises still, and she floats as the light consumes her fully, and the little boy beholds her in naked flame, terrible and divine in all her splendor.  ---

“Well then,” she swirls around him like the wind, “who is the young one who gave up his greatest treasure to save my life?”

 She took small his hands between his, the pale golden warmth speaking true that she yet draws breath.

“It’s only a flower, not really special. It’s no big deal,” he grinned his little gap-tooth grin. “I can grow more if you like, my teacher just said I need more seeds.”

 He looked at the plant, now quite more plain looking without its white crown, yet still stands proud, a stubborn stalk.

The Queen gently tilts his chin up, “It was not the flower, my dear one, that cured me. It was your gift.” 

---

“And then what happened after that?” piped up his dear friend, who was clinging to her seat in anticipation.

“And then,” he prompted, “they gave me this cool pin!” he declared, proudly brandishing a metal flower refrigerator magnet, tied on a piece of yarn.

“I am an official protector of the woodland realm, and a savior of her Majesty, the Fae Queen!”

His friends cheered for him, and after a day playing in the neighborhood park, they decided to get some yoghurt from the local store.

Prior to his little adventure, he believed himself not special in any particular way or form, just like his little flower.

But just like his little unassuming calla lily, his courage saved the Queen.

He didn’t need to imagine it at all. 

END.

BABIESSSSS

Memories of Us chapter 8

So here we go!!!! First time cross posting AO3 and Tumblr! This is exciting 😏 anyway, I wanna give a giant thanks to my friends over at the Astarion Brainrot discord, you all have helped me out with figuring out AO3 and now both places I'm posting to are caught up! Only took the whole week 🥲😅

Well anyway, as always many thanks to my bestie @micropoe10 I appreciate everything you do for me babe 😘 many many maaaaany thanks to @cheesy-cryptid for their artwork ❤️ I literally look at it each time I have to think of something to write.

Memories of Us Chapter 7

Chapter list : [ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ][ 4 ][ 5 ][ 6 ]

Summary: Octavia has a lot of feelings, mentions of family obligations and stress.

As always I want to extend my love to my bestie and beta @micropoe10 💞 without her I wouldn't be posting anything.

Inspired by @cheesy-cryptid 's art 💖

Tags:

@justporo @satanicspinosaurus @sleepy-timaeus

@tragedybunny @davenswitcher @wayward-hel

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

I've seen this passed around a few times, and I have one thing to say:

It's online. The book was carefully and wonderfully recreated online by hand. You can find it here. The entire book is this easy.

calculusmadeeasy.org

something silly and extremely self indulgent, i just want them to hug

Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits

Reblog this on the first of the month for good luck all month long!

Archaeology can be

- Getting enough proof for the Department of Transportation that the local tribes are correct, there is an ancient burial site there, the DoT cannot thus build the highway there

- Identifying and cataloguing mass graves that the government claims does not exist and assisting with both identification and reuniting remains with surviving loved ones

- Investigating impacts of climate anomalies on premodern agricultural communities, which helps other climate scientists with their models

- Rescuing sites from natural disasters or wars and helping local authorities safely take possession of artifacts

- Assisting with locating and disposing of old munitions

And so forth.

Archaeology is actually a pretty hard science. It is an applied science, and it has multiple applications. Most archaeologists are effectively grossly underpaid manual laborers during dig seasons, and it's not 1912 anymore. There are codified ethical standards. If you take a bone home from a dig without proper custody you will never work in the field again.

It is funny. Recently I had a transphobe argue to me, that "well, it is all made up! Animals will still not know that you identify as a man". Which to me is so funny, because while there has never been extensive research done on this topic, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence showing the exact opposite.

As someone who has done a lot of work with animals, I can tell you, that those animals that for one reason or another like one gender more or less than another often show the same loving or hostile behavior towards people completely depending on the gender the people actually identifies as.

"Sure," some people might say, "because if you take hormons you gonna smell like the gender to an animal." But that is the funny part. Animals often act according to that with trans adults who are still in egg mode. Who have not come out yet. And nobody knows why and how they can tell.

But some of the harsher animals with a "gender preference in humans" are like the best trans indicators. You have not admitted to yourself you are a guy? Yeah, this cat is gonna hate you anyways. Because this cat hates men.

Sincerely the guy who got attacked by this one fucking bunny, who didn't like dudes, several times

The image of Astarion as flamboyant Dracula was too much to ignore. So have this.

Audio from the Dracula: a Comedy of Terrors play

Nice to meet you | Baldur’s Gate 3 | Animatic

herbert

ive been to a lot of protests in my life and a thing that a lot of people dont understand is that a protest is a threat. its a large group of people saying “we are being nice now, but you must understand that if we stop being nice we have the power to cause you Problems”.

so everyone saying that protests have to be more polite or follow accepted rules is missing the entire point. the point of a protest is not to say “we disagree with you”, they already know that. the point of a protest is to make it clear that if they continue to do things you disagree with, you will burn down their house.

now this wont stop them because theyre stupid and arrogant and believe themselves to be beyond consequence. so here’s the really important thing and that’s that after they do it anyway, you have to burn down their house

I cannot stress this e-fucking-nough. My great-grandmother - hell, most of my whole family - were on the civil rights marches. The fact they had to be so peaceful was because everything done during those protests was breaking the law. None of it was legal, none of it was nice.

She told me this:

“Understand - to many white people in the US, seeing that many Black people gathered together in one place would have been shocking. It’s easy to bully a family in a town. A bit harder, but bullying a community is still possible. But over a million Black people marching upon the Capital would have had the same effect on every single White person watching. They would know what Black people were REALLY saying behind the hymns and the march.

‘Imagine what would happen if we were angry.’

“White people were terrified of those marches. And there were supposed to be afraid. Of course they were gonna push back - they have the guns, they can make up new laws on the fly. They have all the power in the world, literally - and still, nothing scared them more than a million Black people on the march. Protests stopped working when White people were no longer afraid.”

Something that could have been

A trio of studies— trunk, bark, and undergrowth. (2022)