A male pufferfish tries to impress potential mates with his masterpiece. ✨

by the way, if anybody following me is interested in cosplay, making prop replicas, sewing their own clothes etc then you should definitely check out this Humble Bundle of how-to-cosplay books

it has basically everything a cosplayer (or somebody adjacent to costuming) might want, and then some -- i'm talking sewing, fitting, making foam armours, wig styling, smocking, tailoring, etc etc etc there's seriously loads of different books, and it's at a pay-what-you-want rate, PLUS it helps to support myself & charity (you can even choose where your money goes)

the bundle is only on sale until the 18th of May 2023 so get it while you can & signal boost so other cosplayers & costumers can see!!!

An informational comic I illustrated for my comics 2 class about drag!

Solar Eclipse from a Ship via NASA https://ift.tt/q3uv8Py

Elegant Glass ‘Elytra’ Wings Cleverly Unfurl from Radhika Dhumal’s Expandable Wooden Table

i think more characters should have canes actually. theyre cool. theyre sexy. they can have swords in them. they come in any color u want.

alright I’m rbing to add onto this bc it’s getting way more attention than I ever expected and people seem to be more likely to check the rbs than the replies. plus I want people to be able to rb this version.

the point of this post is not swords. it is not how well someone can fight w a cane. the point is I want to see more disabled representation and I want to see characters who use canes and I want them to use them correctly and I want them to be just as fleshed out and interesting as their abled counterparts.

my cane user friend and I were talking abt sword canes just before I made the post so I tossed it in. I collect blades—knives, daggers, swords—and I’m also a disabled cane user who collects fancy canes. so I think combining the two is cool. I don’t even think they’d be good for self defense, I just think they’re a fun thing to show off to friends!

but this post has always, first and foremost, been abt mobility aids. this is abt being a young cane user who doesn’t see rep. I’d love to see highschool dramas where a character uses a cane but it’s not used to make u pity them, it’s just a regular part of their life. I wanna see fantasy cane users where the animal head handle speaks. I wanna see sci-fi cane users and cane users in romances and cane users in main roles.

I know abt canne de combat and bartitsu and the other fighting styles u can use a cane for. that’s never been what this post is abt. I just want to see myself in media.

everyone who rbs this version gets a kiss on the forehead

everyone who rbs any version that makes my post entirely abt weapons while ignoring the mobility aid part owes me a kofi bc ik for sure there’s enough of yall for me to afford crutches

Kimono and obi by Gofukuyasan

my favorite aesthetic has got to be casualwear and armor. like jeans and a chestplate or a tshirt and sweatpants and full plate gauntlets. that shit fucking rules.

instant +10 fashion buff to any outfit

First rule of reincarnation is to have insane sex with the guy who killed you last time

Ok I love this???

"baptise me in hot dog water"

Hot dog water - there's a Tumblr post out there I've seen saying hot dog water is the opposite of holy water, due to the fact that a single drop of it will contaminate what it touches. I assume this was partly inspired by this allusion but who knows for sure.

Also the the idea of holy water as inhuman and cleaning vs hot dog water as the remains of feeding someone - often a child - and entirely human. It may be dirty and I do not want it on me but God hot dog water has some memories. You will not wash away my sins. They're mine. Also, anyone can make hot dog water but holy water is refined, restricted (yes anyone can make it in an emergency but lay people are restricted from it)

"you and I both know"

Unlike baptism for babies, this one is done between two people who are both aware of what is happening. The one receiving the baptism gives the orders about what they want to happen. The giver and receiver are portrayed as equals. They are equally aware of their humanity.

"the holy stuff won't take"

Ooof heartbreaking, amazing line. Raises so many questions. What does it mean when the water "takes"? What has the receiver done that makes them unfit for holy water? Or, what has the holy water done that makes it to weak to help, to be a part of your life?

The poem as a whole - I love the lack of capitalization. It adds a sort of intimacy to the poem, and the statement from the speaker. The high words "baptise" and "holy" being offset by "take" and "hot dog". Also "hot dog water" vs "holy stuff." The cadence! I would lick it.

I love the serious analysis, and I think I find it persuasive.

This also sheds a lot of light on some plot points in Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated.

Not to turn this into another house full of chintz, but I'mma fuck this poem on the floor.

Meter

There are two readings of the poem's meter that I immediately identify, the first is how I'd want to read it, and the second is how a normal person would probably read it, but both make the same point.

In my interpretation (left), the first line is four wholely irregular feet: an iamb into a dibrach into two trochees; The second line is two trouches into a hanging stressed syllable; And the third line is three iambs.

In the more normal interpretation(right), the first line and second line are six trochees all together plus that hanging syllable in 'knowing' which transitions the poem to iambic trimeter.

And look at the interesting result of that laid bare:

In English poetry there's a tradition, all other things being equal, that iambs are considered the sophisticated foot with trochees often being contrasted as the vulgar or common foot.

The vulgar in specificity "hot dog water" is put in trochee, while the respectably vague "the holy stuff" is afforded iambs. Without the poet having thought of the stress things the pattern actively, this incapulation of the English poetic tradition is astounding. Especially when you consider the

Chiasmus

Chiasmus is a figure of rhetorical construction, in which two pairs of ideas are laid across each other, A B B A. It's one of the more popular figures of rhetoric and if you're looking for it you'll see it everywhere.

In the most literal sense, it's about repetition; but, you can apply it more liberally to ideas, thoughts, or in this case, parts of speech:

The nouns and verb pairs in the first and third lines crossover each other. They are in chiasmus. Structurally, the inversion makes the poem feel more solid, while still furthering emphasizing the contrast between the idea of hot dog water and the holy stuff.

Opening with a command and closing with a result.

map of US social and cultural regions i made that you can use if you want to start a fight

thanks for the question! this is an incorrect map i made to be frustrating and perplexing to look at

the thing I love about the barbie movie hype is that it’s revealing how people played with barbies when they were a kid. I only had Barbies so typically I chose the lesbian affairs and murder plotting route, but if I was at a friend’s house and they had a Ken, I’d often go bisexual marital troubles. hey sound off how you played with your barbies I’m curious now

This is a few pages from Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a graphic novel, now with a musical adaptation on broadway. In the wake of it’s Tony win[s] I am re-reading it and these pages stood out to me as an incredible explanation of OCD. One of the many frustrating things about OCD is having trouble explaining what it’s actually like in a world where the vocabulary around it for most people just means “I like things to be really clean!”  For many of us though, our OCD has nothing to do with cleanliness but with the rules our mind creates for the world around us, making everything an obstacle course to which it’s hard to constantly not add new rules and work-arounds.  Fun Home is a tremendous, beautiful and heart-filling read for all kinds of reasons too, and you should read it.  If you’re interested in more reading on what it feels like to have OCD in practice, David Sedaris describes it incredibly well in an essay in Naked, as well. Okay bye!

"being distressed about an evil thought is what shows you're a good person" = bad, unhelpful, is not at all conducive to OCD recovery

"there's no such thing as a good or bad thought", "your thoughts do not define your morality", etc = good, helpful, acknowledges the fact that thoughtcrime isn't real

remember kids, implying that distress is what makes you a good person is NOT a good way to encourage people to build a life where they are able to learn to live alongside intrusive thoughts

You could shoot fireballs with some engineering...

now I'm envisioning fantasy wizards who're like "you want me to shoot a fireball?? Oh no no, that's applied sorcery. I do multidimensional analysis. It's exactly as difficult but significantly less messy, because nothing ever explodes except my perception of reality."

magic is real but unfortunately we think it's just normal science because we understand how it works. yeah we use it to send magic eyes into the vast aether and capture pictures of unimaginably distant worlds. we drew lightning out of the earth and bound it in stone tablets and taught it the language "yes or no" and now it casts an invisible web around the world we use to instantly communicate. I use the power granted me by studying the true language of the universe for a decade to manage my money and be better than average at games of chance, but learning that language has permanently rewired my brain to see the world as logical progressions and hard truths versus falsehoods. Wizard Steve brewed up "potion of extremely high det velocity" in his shed using soap and rocks

I finished the Scholomance series and I am absolutely convinced that I understand it better than literally anyone else. This is directly related to my recent trip down Transformers fanfiction.

More wild is that yes, Scholomance was in part inspired by The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas. I know this because the fanfic that Novik wrote paralleling this series has a note at the beginning explicitly saying that the fic is about that. Yes this fic is about Transformers and includes wildly hot robot sex. That's not the point

Hey wait a second, she fucking named him Orion

I fear that how much time I spend in a microenvironment like tumblr is shaping my perception of culture because I just found out "eroticism of the machine" isn't a concept that exists in the general consciousness or as a media trope or anything. if I Google it the first result is a Tumblr post. do the people of Earth not understand how inherently sensual the wires and pistons are

I saw this at QuiltCon 2023 in Atlanta today and wanted to share. I have so many more pictures and can’t share them all right now, but this peaceful scene felt like a good one to leave you with for now

Here’s another one of the quilts from QuiltCon that will really stay with me. I have never in my life made anything like this, the technical skills are truly incredible. The award was well-deserved.

It’s been long enough since I worked at the hideously mismanaged nanotech startup that I’ve started romanticizing it. Like, yes the hydrogen explosion was scary and I’m entirely too familiar with the odor of decaborane, and yes the CEO and CTO got in a fistfight in the conference room, but nothing makes you feel alive like turning chunks of graphite on an ancient manual lathe with inadequate respiratory PPE.

Asbestosis-like lung damage via inhalation of loose airborn boron nitride nanotubes, nitrate-induced chronic migraines, and a crippling caffeine addiction build character.

Fondly remembering the day where we decided to try a nickel organometallic catalyst instead of our usual iron. The difference being that while nickel should be a better catalyst, if you get an iron carbonyl leak the room smells bad for a bit, whereas if you get a nickel carbonyl leak you’re dead before you hit the floor.

So much adrenaline! We went home wired and giddy, full to the brim with nightmares and scientific euphoria. Every day I dreaded waking up, and every day I held the raw stuff of miracles in my hands. Good times.

god lived in this box, I’m pretty sure

No. Even with such egregious safety shortcuts, they barely even scratched the surface of what was possible. Sure, they had drive and vision, but never enough for my taste. They weren’t mad. They were barely even eccentric.

And I was no mere hench! I know the process. Every single object you see in these pictures was designed and assembled by me, with my own mind and hands. And moreover, I know all the radical experiments that they were too timid to attempt. All I need is some space, a bit of cash, and a used furnace or two, and I will spin up an operation to put my erstwhile peers to shame.

For as much as they were willing to risk with our health, they were unwilling to risk the money. Honestly, I get it. People do stupid things when funding is on the line. Happens all the time. I can’t even be angry. I’m really not.

No, I’m not mad, I’m just… frustrated.

OP how does it feel to be a real life mad scientist

Ok so if you haven’t already heard of it, there’s an excellent podcast on engineering disasters (and sometimes engineering disgraces) called Well There’s Your Problem, and they have a segment at the end of every episode called Safety Third, which is listeners writing in about egregiously unsafe experiences they have had especially at their workplaces.

OP, I am BEGGING you to write in with this because I want so badly to hear their voices read your email with mounting horror as they get to the pictures of the box god probably lived in.

(Also if this is the first you’re hearing of the podcast, last week’s episode had the wonderful Maia Arson Crimew @nyancrimew to talk about cybersecurity among other things, which was excellent. On the whole, great podcast, would recommend.)

124 episodes of workplace drama?????? Holy crap, this’ll keep me occupied for a few weeks, thank you!

I am enjoying the fuck out of the notes here, most of which are variations on “I thought this was a bit and then OH MY GOD THERE WAS A PICTURE.” and look I’ve mostly worked in the corners of science that are founded in naturalistic variation with very little room for hubris and I still believed every word from OP there. I’ve seen with my own eyes a video of the time my friend genetically engineered a hamster for maximum rage, okay? I’ve seen the consequences of the horrors and the thwarted sulking of those whose hands have been slapped by IRBs or Environmental Health and Safety or IT. I have two different friends on IRBs and one of these days I’m gonna make friends with someone at EHS purely for the cocktail party stories. And that is in the relatively tame field of behavioral research, okay, I’m not fucking with the stuff of material reality here.

Also I’ve read the inimitable Derek Lowe’s Things I Won’t Work With and I have a healthy fear of applied chemists.