“A Family portrait during the Spanish Flu, 1918″

(via)

Head empty, cat maid

Because i feel like drawing him in it lmao

(might do Tsukishima next)

that one fucking concept art of the dragon age races that depicts dwarves like this:

you suck and i defy you

this makes me violent <3

Calling all dragon age artists! Let’s see your interpretation of what dwarven women should look like!

Okay, here u go

@luccorvus​ can u please do the Qunari next!!

Sure thing

Did You Know: A Sphinx (right) is a mythical creature that has been previously associated with the province of Elsweyr?

Source

Stephanie Perkins, Isla and the Happily Ever After (via weltenwellen)

to be a mother, something has to give. It may sound obvious, but it is anything other than sentimental. Nor in the end does it compromise her demand for freedom for women, since to experience motherhood in this way, the mother must give herself freely to her child; though it does give the lie to the belief that you can truly be free all by yourself, or at anybody else’s expense

Tatsuyuki Tanaka

Mephala, whose sphere is obscured to mortals; known by the names Webspinner, Spinner, and Spider; whose only consistent theme seems to be interference in the affairs of mortals for her amusement.

babey!

why is there no electricity after the apocalypse?

something people writing post-apocalyptic fiction always seem to forget is how extremely easy basic 20th century technology is to achieve if you have a high school education (or the equivalent books from an abandoned library), a few tools (of the type that take 20 years to rust away even if left out in the elements), and the kind of metal scrap you can strip out of a trashed building.

if you want an 18th century tech level, you really need to somehow explain the total failure of humanity as a whole to rebuild their basic tech infrastructure in the decade after your apocalypse event.

i am not a scientist or an engineer, i’m just a house husband with about the level of tech know-how it takes to troubleshoot a lawn mower engine, but i could set up a series of wind turbines and storage batteries for a survivor compound with a few weeks of trial and error out of the stuff my neighbors could loot from the wreckage of the menards out on highway 3. hell, chances are the menards has a couple roof turbines in stock right now. or you could retrofit some from ceiling fans; electric motors and electric generators are the same thing, basically.

radio is garage-tinkering level tech too. so are electric/mechanical medical devices like ventilators and blood pressure cuffs. internal combustion’s trickiest engineering challenge is maintaining your seals without a good source of replacement parts, so after a few years you’re going to be experimenting with o-rings cut out of hot water bottles, but fuel is nbd. you can use alcohol. you can make bio diesel in your back yard. you can use left-over cooking oil, ffs.

what i’m saying is, we really have to stop doing the thing where after the meteor/zombies/alien invasion/whatever everyone is suddenly doing ‘little house on the prairie’ cosplay. unless every bit of metal or every bit of knowlege is somehow erased, folks are going to get set back to 1950 at the most. and you need to account somehow for stopping them from rebuilding the modern world, because that’s going to be a lot of people’s main life goal from the moment the apocalypse lets them have a minute to breathe.

nobody who remembers flush toilets will ever be content with living the medieval life, is what i’m saying. let’s stop writing the No Tech World scenario.

the thing *I* get mad about is no one goes and fixes up any of the hundreds of thousands of airplanes lying around, or even puts together any new ones. like the big fucking stumbling block for all those thousands of years for humans seemed to just be no one managed to combine the idea for a propeller with an engine that would spin it fast enough. but now the genie is thoroughly out of the bottle: drawings of planes have the propeller on it. we will remember that the secret to airplanes is smallish airfoil wings and a very very fast propellor (or three) for a thousand years, until all the books and drawings and planes themselves have decayed away. 

like yeah you couldn’t make commercial jetliners in your garage, but if you camped out in an old airfield, you could probably bang together some kind of working franken-cessna. 

I have an uncle who got bored and built a flyable franken-cessna in his garage a few years ago based upon his knowledge as an automotive worker so you really don’t need to be a specialized aeronautics expert to build a plane. You just gotta be able to stop your dog’s weird anti-aircraft vendetta long enough to put it together.

but yeah, the electricity thing bugs me so much. Solar panels are everywhere these days. It isn’t super hard to set up small wind turbines. But! the thing that bugs me the most is the assumption that the whole power grid of a continent would just fall apart all at once and never get back up and running (assuming your apocalypse doesn’t explicitly state why that happened).

like look at the 2003 Northeast Blackout in North America. Cascading failures sent about 250 power plants offline. But even in areas hit by the blackout there were pockets that were fine. Either they had local power generation or they caught on to what was happening and separated from the grid before it hit them. Or they got back up and running the same night. And it didn’t expand beyond the northeast area because the whole of north america isn’t connected to each other. You could have something hit the east coast and the west coast but Quebec and Texas would be there happily flipping everyone off as they basked in their separate grids.

And! different types of power generation are going to have different levels of protection. A solar farm probably has a fence that will keep out the local hooligans. A wind farm is just fuck off tall and leaves it to sheer height to stop people from fucking with it. Hydroelectric dams depends on how big it is, could be dedicated armed security, could be the two dudes on duty to run the turbine that day who’re just annoyed they’re missing lunch. Nuclear has an entire department who’s sole purpose is to fuck you up and they are very bored and would like to have a reason to use the armoured truck. So yeah, you can’t just walk into most of these places with the intent to “destroy the grid” or if you can walk into them people are going to be like, why is that random dude out there literally tilting at windmills maybe someone should stop him.

Also, I am always disappointed when north american authors forget that ARES (amateur radio emergency services) exists. It’s a bunch of local volunteers who are super into radio but also they will drop everything and head into disaster zones to run emergency communications. Your cell phone might not work, your internet might never come back on, but buddy down the road has access to a  radio and a can do attitude.

some fantastic additions here!

and to everyone who was like “you can’t use your devices directly off a turbine” oh my god i knooooow, did you think my post was a tutorial? you can do the farming part of the postapocalypse. please leave electricity to people who know there are reference materials.

oh. Just…oh.

dresses i would wear to murder my husband and then take over his kingdom 

In order

1: the Royal Wedding Dress

2: the Help, Please, My Husband Is Dead! dress

3: the funeral/Official Mourning dress

4: the To Lead This Kingdom In My Husband’s Stead Is A Heavy Burden, But I Solemnly Vow To Do So With Honor And Integrity, Long Live The Queen! dress

i think sometimes that in writing and life we make the error of assuming what someone is pushed into saying in moments of extreme emotion are the Most Truthful.

there are times that difficult or ugly things are true, or when people need help letting go of ugly things they don't WANT to believe but do despite their wishes.

but that feeling of "i wish i hadn't said that" after an argument, or someone else saying "i regret saying that," isn't necessarily trying to brush away an uncomfortable "truth." in writing conflict, and in real life, a lot of the time people are shaped by the choices that they make AGAINST their most selfish, base instincts. this is why pushing against someone until they break and spill ugly things at another person isn't necessarily uncovering their "true" feelings.

(maybe this perspective is partly from having dealt with intrusive thoughts for so long, thoughts i've had to learn don't define me or aren't "really" me as long as i'm making the choice to not act on them or dwell on them.)

often, people have two reactions to a situation: an impulsive reaction and their considered reaction. choosing to bite one's tongue isn't just polite, but it can be an intentional act of love or kindness. it's not cowardice or dishonesty to do the hard, crawling work of reshaping your own internal responses out of some greater motive or care. and the things that people say when they fail to do this aren't always the things they WANT to hold or believe.

that's why "clearing the air" in fiction can ring false. most people don't feel better, not for long, about saying gross things they are frequently tempted to hold on to. sometimes, someone finally being honest can be refreshing, but most of the time unless clearing the air is actually sorting out misunderstandings that cast things in a better light? people end up feeling worse.

that's becuase the uglier things we think about each other in our relationships are, to some degree, only true if we let them be. the compulsion to just finally say that awful thing that runs through your head when you're already upset isn't going to actually vent your anger the way you hope it will. you might feel better for a little, and then what you've done really is worn a groove in the neural pathway of being an angry, cruel person. if you do that often enough, then the actual truth in play is that you are a person who won't do much work to shape kindness in yourself, and will always hold others flaws against them for your own emotional convenience.

in life and in fiction, kind people usually aren't kind because they never think anything awful. it's becuase they've never let those grooves wear deep. they've refused to become addicted to the short-lived high of explosive impulse, with all other considerations taking a backseat. choosing kindness in relationships, no matter now difficult they are, is a daily choice where the truth of what you think about another person is what you choose to focus on and say. it's looking at someone with intentional, active love and care. it gets easier with practice.

and some hard truths are most truthful when they're delivered with the same considerate love.

in writing relationships and in real life ones, make sure you aren't assuming people at their worst are saying the most truthful things. sometimes, the truth is in what someone is choosing every day even when it's hard.