Wow everyone is going through it. Hold my hand
reblog to hold the hand of the person you reblogged from
i'm not doing this because it would be a lot of work but a while ago there was a really good thread on twitter about fairytale retellings and the essential core of a story - people have different feelings about what the essential features of any given fairytale are, so if the reader's essential feature of, say, Cinderella is different from the author's, they'll say the book isn't really a retelling of Cinderella.
for example, to me Cinderella's essential features are
- mistreatment by family
- unexpected help from an outside figure
- mysterious attendance at an exclusive event
- recognition by a token afterwards
there are a couple more i'd like to see but aren't essential.
anyway that's a lot of preamble to the part that's work, but i think an interesting poll series would be "what do you think the essential features of [fairytale] are?"
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
Hey, you! Yeah, you with the cool neocities!
You're doing great! Really love what you've done with the place so far. Now here's something important moving forward. If you are making a neocities - especially if you are doing so with the motivation to fight back against Web 3.0 and reclaim the web as a space for individual users instead of for companies - please, keep the following in mind:
An inaccessible web is not a free web.
Repeat after me: An inaccessible web is not a free web.
Resources for Beginners to Learn About Web Accessibility and Web Design:
- W3C's Introduction to Web Accessibility | W3C is the organization that decides on the standards of Accessibility on the web. They are an invaluable direct resource.
- A Beginner's Guide to Understanding Web Accessibility
- Mozilla's Accessibility Overview
- WebAIM's Introduction to Web Accessibility
- What is Web Accesibility in 60 Seconds! [YouTube Video]
- Accessibility: What's the difference between WCAG Levels A and AA? [YouTube Video]
- FreeCodeCamp | FCC provides an extremely beginner friendly Responsive Web Design course. The lessons for this course integrate accessibility standards naturally, and also have individual lessons specifically for teaching accessibility.
- FreeCodeCamp's Accessibility Tag on their News Page
- HTML Dog's Tutorial's for HTML, CSS, and Javascript
- MarkSheet's Free HTML and CSS Tutorial
- W3C's Easy Checks
- W3C's QuickRef on How to Meet WCAG | I have filtered the QuickRef link to only show Level A requirements. This is the easiest level to meet and is considered the "bare minimum."
- WAVE: Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
soft reminder for bad days
-have you taken your meds?
-have you had any water?
-have you had a snack?
-its okay to cry.
-you are loved.
-having a bad day does not make you bad.
It sucks that people are treating the Reddit blackout as a joke or assuming it's impotent rage over a minor decision bc it's Reddit when like. No, a tech company shutting down access to their API by forcing third-party devs to pay completely unreasonable fees ($12,000 per 50 million API requests, which to the largest third party clients would be tens of millions of dollars) and in the process destroying both accessibility apps and moderation tools is Bad Actually
Hey, this pride month (or literally any time of year), you wanna know something fairly easy and great you can do?
Contact your local library (or comment on their social media) positively for any pride/LGBTQIA+/queer-related displays or events they have going on.
Seriously.
What I’m seeing and hearing from the (mostly US-based) library workers in my groups and social circles is that the anti-queer (anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-drag queen story time, etc.) comments and complaints that have ramped up in the past year aren’t going away. Even library workers with supportive coworkers/bosses/boards are steeling themselves to deal with an avalanche of garbage, or are second-guessing their displays and events because the amount of vitriol can wear a person down so much. And the ones without supportive people or work environments? It’s worse.
Give the library something else: give them both the ammo (by being one of the numbers they can count worth the positive group) if they need to show their community isn’t wholly negative. Give them the compliment of knowing that their work got appreciated.
- A comment like “I love this” or “Wow, that looks great!”
- An email about how much you’re excited about X event
- A call saying you wanted to let them know you appreciate this thing
- Tagging them if you share a picture or positive comment on social media
- “Cool shirt/pins/etc!” (Because people are also bring harassed about personally being queer, even if it’s not a library display)
- Literally anything that would be positive for them to receive
I realize the above might sound simple, like suspiciously simple, but you don’t have to just take my word for it—just take a gander at the notes:
So just to reiterate: it really can be as simple as a social media comment or a two-sentence email.
(Now is it possible to do more? Yes! Going to events when you can is always good! Voting for public officials who support the library—library boards in some places, but also school board members who don’t want to ban books, city councils who don’t act disgusted at drag queen story hour, etc. Contact your elected folks if they’re being anti-library, etc.)
Anything is better than nothing.
But as people will often point out on posts about libraries, they’re not all the same: your library may not have events, or displays, for a number of reasons. You can still support your library with easy things like:
- Comment/email/call/post about a book you enjoyed that fits the criteria, or how you were happy to find it for your child/nibling/friend/whoever
- Ask them for recommendations
- Ask if a Pride display is coming because you’d love to find new reads/any other reason
- Check out books/materials and return them! Libraries love statistics!
- Is your library not doing anything, or doing less (possibly because of aforementioned problems)? Politely express your disappointment. "I haven't seen a pride display yet this year, is one coming?" or "I'm disappointed not to see a display for Pride Month" or "I was excited for X event and sad that it's been canceled/not happening this year, are there plans to do it again in the future?" Remember you don't know what's happening behind the scenes (but check the notes of this post for a glimpse)
- Closeted or not otherwise able/wanting to be out? You don't have to out yourself to say you like or appreciate seeing things! “I just love the options here at X Library!” “What a lovely display!”
- Request a book they don’t have! Literally the worst that’ll happen is they say no, and patron requests can often build a case/show support for titles that the workers aren’t sure about/are worried about complaints. (A request doesn’t guarantee its purchase for reasons that are a separate post! But it doesn’t hurt to ask.)
The current tsunami of anti-library, anti-queer hate didn't appear overnight, but if you're not plugged in library circles, you may not realize how bad things really are. Supporting your library is a year-round endeavor, but as you can see, it can also be super easy. Libraries are for everyone, not just right-wing HOA members—so make sure that they hear from the rest of us, too.
I'm seeing some frustration over fandom creatives expressing anger or distress over people feeding their work into ChatGPT. I'm not responding to OP directly because I don't want to derail their post (their intent was to provide perspective on how these models actually work, and reduce undue panic, which is all coming from a good place!), but reassurances that the addition of our work will have a negligible impact on the model (which is true at this point) does kind of miss the point? Speaking for myself, my distress is less about the practical ramifications of feeding my fic into ChatGPT, and more about the principle of someone taking my work and deliberately adding it to the dataset.
Like, I fully realize that my work is a drop in the bucket of ChatGPT's several-billion-token training set! It will not make a demonstrable practical difference in the output of the model! That doesn't change the fact that I do not want my work to be part of the set of data that the ChatGPT devs use for training.
According to their FAQ, ChatGPT can and will use user input to train itself. The terms and conditions explicitly state that they save your chats to help train and improve their models. (You can opt-out, but sharing is the default.) So if you're feeding a fic into ChatGPT, unless you've explicitly opted out, you are handing it to the ChatGPT team and giving them permission to use it for training, whether or not that was your intent.
Now, will one fic make a demonstrable difference in the output of the model? No! But as the person who spent a year and a handful of months laboring over my fic, it makes a difference to me whether my fic, specifically, is being used in the dataset. If authors are allowed to have a problem with the ChatGPT devs for scraping millions of fics without permission, they're also allowed to have a problem with folks handing their individual fics over via the chat interface.
I do want to add that if you've done this to a fic, please don't take this as me being upset with you personally! Folks are still learning new information and puzzling out what "good" vs. "bad" use is, from an ethical standpoint. (Heck, my own perspective on this is deeply based on my own subjective feelings!) And we certainly shouldn't act like one person feeding a fic into ChatGPT has the same practical negative impact, on a broad societal scale, as a team using a web crawler to scrape five billion pieces of artwork for Stable Diffusion.
The point is that fundamentally, an ethical dataset should be obtained with the consent of those providing the data. Just because it's normalized for our data to be scraped without consent doesn't make it ethical, and this is why ChatGPT gives users the option to not share data— there is actually a standardized way (robots.txt) for website servers to set policies for how bots/crawlers can interact with them, for exactly this reason— and I think fandom artists and authors are well within their rights to express a desire for opting out to be the socially-respected default within the fandom community.
Very Brief Guide to [tumblr], for Reddit refugees
Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:
- Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.
- Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.
- Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It's hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.
- Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:
- Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.
Basic Features of the Site:
- Reblogs drive the entire site. If you'd upvote something on Reddit, you'd reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you're not required to.
- The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top
- You can send an ask to someone, and it'll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don't want.
- Tags aren't actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can't use quotation marks (") or commas in them without fucking it up
- You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you'll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff
- You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.
- Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.
Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:
- Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog
- Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.
- If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.
- You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"
- Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.
- Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.
- We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.
- Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.
General Etiquette:
- Don't try to do epic clapbacks here, you'll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.
- Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.
- Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it
- You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask "hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?" and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It's generally polite to oblige, but "no" is still reasonable.
- Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.
- Don't put fandom tags or jokes on someone's posts about serious matters or personal shit
- You're responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don't like, that's probably on you. Don't be afraid to unfollow.
- Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.
- Reblog, don't repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn't "steal" engagement like Twitter retweets.
- If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal
- Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.
Tips:
- Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension
- In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.
- You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!
- Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs
- Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.
Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!
YOUTUBE???!!???
I mean, I guess I believe it could happen? Christ.
(And I feel so ancient.)
(chuckle) 1973.
Bound paper Trek fanfics from underneath a dealer's table at (I think) Lunacon.
(pausing to check the date) Yeah, it was '73: Harlan was the GoH that year. :)
I was a latecomer! I started reading fanfic on hand-coded individual geocities sites in the 90s.
people who know my oldest username (so, just me) can look on Wayback and find the fic I posted to a hand-coded individual Geocities site in like 2001, but I started on either a fannish BBS or a single-fandom archive, I forget
how tf do people read fics on YouTube? please tell me it's at least podfic audio with synced fanfic text, otherwise wtf is that choice of medium?
For bonus: companion headcanons (well, those appearing in ficverse anyway)
Tumblr Migration 2: Reddit Boogaloo
We all know about the Twitter immigrants, but there seems to be radio silence on what's happening now with Reddit users from certain subreddits doing a similar thing.
What's happening?
Reddit is restricting their API later this month and killing off third-party apps. An AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the CEO Steve Hoffman was held and it was clear that he would continue with the changes.
In protest, thousands of subreddits across the site are planning to go dark for 48 hours on June 12th. Some are planning to continue indefinitely until the changes are reversed.
Okay, so how does this affect Tumblr?
Some subreddits (mainly queer and left-leaning meme ones, don't worry too much about Reddit Atheists™ overrunning us) are encouraging their users to jump ship to our beloved - and beloathed - hellsite. There will be another influx of new users and many will be unfamiliar with how the site works.
What do us Tumblr users do?
Show them how to use the site; introduce them to the site's culture, tell them to reblog shit and curate their dashboard. Sorta like how we welcomed Twitter users back when they flocked here. Kungpowpenising optional.
I'm new from Reddit, what do I do here?
CHANGE YOUR PROFILE PICTURE AND BANNER TO SOMETHING OTHER THAN DEFAULT BECAUSE THIS SITE IS FILLED WITH BOTS AND YOU MIGHT BE MISTAKEN FOR ONE. This is the FIRST thing you should do after getting a blog.
Other folks can help you with stuff like curating your dashboard or creating sideblogs (or you can look shit up) but please, PLEASE just give yourself an icon and reblog some stuff so people don't mistake you for a bot
This is one of the first posts I've seen after trying to look at Tumblr again, so I've decided to head their advice and reblog this. I don't even know what a reblog is but I'll find out in time. It's a learning process
a reblog is what you just did! it's similar to a retweet on twitter and it's the main way things spread on tumblr
Feel free to choose an OC who you think will have interesting answers.
2. What's your oc's orientation? (Romantic/sexual/platonic alterous ect) Do they have opinions about it?
8. Have they had struggles with their identity, be it due to internal or external reasons?
16. Did you ever change an oc's identity when they were already established? Why?
18. Do you prefer to give your ocs specific labels, or keep it unspecified? Why? If applicable, do you change their labels depending on circumstance?
2. What's your oc's orientation? (Romantic/sexual/platonic alterous ect) Do they have opinions about it?
8. Have they had struggles with their identity, be it due to internal or external reasons?
Oh dear, I think I've answered for the only characters who really have well established orientations/identities, since I basically answered for Savler along with Jezari.
Most of my characters fall into one of two categories: this person is focused on something else, so they're probably somewhere on the aro and/or ace end of things (Novani, Lysara, maybe Pheodra (though she's something of a special case, since she explicitly sets aside her own desires to serve the Empire)) or this person was attracted to this other person, therefore they're straight or bi...or possibly demi (Tevin, Daska, Ianya...and Deell, for that matter ).
And then there are a few characters whose orientations I really haven't considered (Aril'ree, Lord Dralick).
Okay, maybe I've willfully ignored the question of Dralick's orientation since that has the potential to add extra creepy vibes to his villain relationship with Kyrian. (Extra creepy vibes that might be there a little bit anyway.)
Hem, anyway, back to ignoring that.
Character orientations have a bad habit of only coming up when they're somehow relevant to the story or the character. Or just only come up with very much main characters. Or something.
Which isn't very satisfying, I know.
16. Did you ever change an oc's identity when they were already established? Why?
Answered here.
18. Do you prefer to give your ocs specific labels, or keep it unspecified? Why? If applicable, do you change their labels depending on circumstance?
Once established, I do, just as I note anything else I establish about them. Now, granted, that might start with something like "some flavor of [orientation]" and get more specific as I work out what that flavor is.
Of course, with very few exceptions, they all start out unspecified because I frequently forget to think about their orientation. I don’t even necessarily think of their gender identity beyond what they’re presenting as. I suspect it has something to do with having [file not found] for my own identity. I almost always have the sexuality equivalent and occasionally the gender equivalent of that tumblr story about the blind professor who forgot to turn on the light for his sighted student to take a test in his office, except instead of “I forgot! You can see!” it’s “I forgot! You’re supposed to have a sexuality!”
Pride themed ask: #8 for Jezari and Kyrian (and any others you want to talk about) also, 14 & 16 (and 21 of course!)
Well, that got long...
8. Have they had struggles with their identity, be it due to internal or external reasons?
''Useless'' Writing Reminders
- Save your documents. Strive to be safe, not sorry.
- Back-up your documents. Strive to be safe, not sorry.
- Placeholder names can quickly turn into forever names. Picking name(s) on a whim can lead to great things, or it can become your worst nightmare (😁).
- Your writing has value. Yes, even the most inadequate of writing. You don't have to boast or even like everything you've ever written, but even the most questionable of writing will have contributed to your growth as a storyteller. Cherish it for what it is.
- You can take a break. It is absolutely okay.
- First drafts are scary. But you know what's more scary? Not having a draft at all.
- Using clichés or ''overdone'' tropes will not kill your story. Firstly, tropes are building blocks. Secondly, humans actively search to consume stories revolving around these tropes.
- Write your heart out. Boast about your writing. Boast about your friends' and fellow writers' writing. Everyone deserves recognition, even you, from within your own heart. (Sorry. That's really cheesy. But it's true).
Them: arrows deal piercing damage
Me: hold my quiver
(I couldn't not use this soundtrack)
🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈PRIDE THEMED OC ASK GAME🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️
Bc I wanted one and didn't find it so. Here
[Send ask aimed at a specific character]
1. What's your oc's gender identity? What's their relationship to their gender?
2. What's your oc's orientation? (Romantic/sexual/platonic alterous ect) Do they have opinions about it?
3. How did your oc discover themself? Did something cause them to question, or did they always know?
4. Is your oc's environment supportive about their identity? How does this impact them?
5. How did you figure out your oc's identity?
6. How does your oc feel about labels? Theirs, or in general?
7. Is there something that could cause your oc to question their identity? What?
8. Have they had struggles with their identity, be it due to internal or external reasons?
9. Are there cultural or lore specific aspects to their identity? If applicable, does their species affect it?
10. Does your oc celebrate Pride? How?
11. Is your oc open about their identity? Are they more lowkey or more blunt about it? Why or why not?
12. Does/did your oc ever wish they could change the way they are? Why? If it's in the past, how did they get over the feeling? (this can be about internalized homo/transphobia)
13. Would your oc be open to a poly relationship? Why or why not?
[Not aimed at a specific character] / [Aimed at creator]
14. Do you have ocs on the aro or ace spectrum?
15. Do any of your ocs use neopronouns? Which ones?
16. Did you ever change an oc's identity when they were already established? Why?
17. Do you share identity with any of your ocs? Which ones?
18. Do you prefer to give your ocs specific labels, or keep it unspecified? Why? If applicable, do you change their labels depending on circumstance?
19. Do you have preferences about depicting homo/transphobia in your stories? What, and why? Does it vary by story?
20. Have your ocs helped you in self discovery? How?
21. Free ramble card wee
The Spoonie Garden
I’ve mentioned this in a couple of posts, and now it’s probably time for the full post about it. A little while after I got officially diagnosed with fibromyalgia, I decided to start trying a little herb garden. It started just in propagator boxes on my windowsill, but soon moved to pots hanging on the balcony rail. I have no idea what possessed me to try gardening right when I’d been diagnosed with a chronic pain condition, but I think it had something to do with wanting something nice, and also wanting something to nurture and care for in the hopes that doing so would motivate me to do the same for myself. Either way, I never looked back, and I’m even trying flowers this year, because having herbs is nice but I wanted something that was just pretty.
Now, a lot of people think they can’t have a window or balcony garden. I was one of them until I decided to try it anyway. One of the things I found was that a lot of the things people worry about aren’t that big a deal. Light levels, for instance. My flat faces northwest, and it doesn’t get a lot of sun; I was always told that this would make it very hard to keep a garden. But honestly, there’s been light enough for most of the herbs I’ve wanted to grow, and even enough for tomatoes. Space isn’t so much of an issue either; most of the herbs I grow are pretty self-contained, and I could move them all indoors if I had to for the winter. Thing is, even that’s not a necessity for most of them; I had a lot of my herbs outside and while they seemed to die over the winter months, the spring brought them right back. It’s really a matter of remembering to water them daily (not even that in the winter months when they’re mostly hibernating), maybe treat them to some plant food once a week, and cutting them back when winter’s coming to dry the herbs for use in the winter months. (Another reason that a dehydrator is such a good investment.) Plus it makes a lot of recipes a bit more budget-friendly, having your own fresh herbs on demand. The problem with recipes that only call for a couple of sprigs of a certain herb is that supermarkets never sell them in “just a couple of sprigs”, so you end up paying above the odds for a bunch of herbs knowing that you’ll throw away half of them.
Here’s my list of must-have herbs for the window or balcony, with pictures:
Parsley
Parsley sees use in a lot of different recipes, and it’s sturdier than you’d think. At the time this was taken, the tallest stalks were waist-high on me. I haven’t used it much, but my mother dropped by for a few stalks the other day, and I’ve been thinking of trying parsley sauce, so it’s good to have.
Sage and Rosemary
These both survived the winter outdoors, even during a cold snap, with no trouble at all. Sage and rosemary are wonderful in stews, to stuff a whole chicken, all sorts of things. Plus, of course, my recent lemon and rosemary steak recipe needs the rosemary, so it came in very handy today.
Oregano and Thyme
These two looked like they died over the winter. I cut back the oregano but didn’t bother with the thyme. I don’t know why I left the pots out there, but when I saw new green growth in and amongst the dead-looking stalks, I just watered them and waited to see what would happen. This is the end result; since that picture was taken, the oregano has only got bigger, and the thyme is almost entirely green and is flowering. I’m a big fan of oregano, especially in pasta sauces, and it’s so much better fresh. Thyme’s also good in stews and in whole roast chicken, and at least one recipe I’ve made recently called for it, so both have been worth it.
Mint, Coriander / Cilantro, and Dill
The mint is another one I cut back over the winter and watched it resurrect come spring. I have plans for mint sauce, and I stick the leaves in the dehydrator and have an endless source of mint tea. I also have plans towards learning how to make my own mint extract. As for the coriander / cilantro … well, that I did have to replant this year, but it’s come along nicely. One of the dill plants (the one in the grey pot) is also one I planted this spring, but the other is actually a rescue plant - I got one of those pots of live dill from the supermarket for my refrigerator dill pickle recipe, and decided to repot it to see if it would thrive. Looks like it did. Now I’m never short of dill for my refrigerator dill pickles; I don’t have to buy £1 worth of dill to use maybe eight sprigs and throw the rest away, and all it costs me is some time watering them in the morning.
(Not pictured - basil, which I recently repotted and moved outside but isn’t quite impressive enough to take pictures of yet. Another one that’s good for pasta sauces, though I forgot my resolution to grow enough for pesto sauce this year.)
It’s an investment of time and spoons, but it’s got serious benefits. Watching something you planted grow is kind of miraculous, in its way, and I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me at least, it helps my mental state. I have moments of feeling pretty helpless and trapped and useless with the fibromyalgia. I mean, I can’t go to half the places I used to, I walk with a cane, and there are so many doors closed to me because of all of this. But my little balcony garden shows me that I can still do things, even if it’s only watering the plants once a day and remembering to throw in some plant food once a week. There’s tangible proof that I am accomplishing something in spite of how much I hurt.
Also, again, fresh herbs are vastly superior to dried herbs, and picking them fresh off the plant is better still. A non-starter in winter, admittedly, but when most of your herbs will actually benefit from being cut down in winter and the ones that don’t won’t take long to replant, at least being able to dry your own herbs for winter use saves money in the long run.
It’s not something that everyone can do, having a little garden, but more people can do it than think they can. If you don’t have a balcony, a windowsill will do. A lot of plants will be okay with whatever light you can give them. Also, when you’ve watched something go from a tiny shoot to a foot-high explosion of aromatic greenery, it’s pretty easy to remember to water them. Just remember to always use a bigger pot than you think they’re going to need when repotting. Roots need room to breathe, and if there’s not enough soil to absorb water, the water you give it will just drain out and your plant will wilt no matter how much you water it.
Fresh herbs are a joy in the kitchen, and they don’t take as much space, or as many spoons, to maintain as you’d think. Maybe give it a try with just one if you’re a little nervous about it - pick your favourite herb and get some seeds and soil, and try it at home. Therapeutic and tasty.
My cat that’s been having a lot of health problems lately decided to add cancer to the mix. Just the testing alone costs $2000+ dollars and that’s on top of all the other vet bills I had from last month.
Soooo that means open commissions again yaaaaaay!
For a slot you can either send an ask, or buy a slot through my ko-fi.
I also have a ko-fi shop with copies of my comic, as well as stickers and sketchbooks.