(via)

he is training for boxing champion ship.

hey so it’s march now aka the beginning of endometriosis awareness month and i feel obligated to remind you that debilitatingly painful periods are not normal. if you or someone you know is ending up sick or bedridden every month, you are not crazy and deserve medical attention from someone who will take you seriously

hey it’s march again let’s get this post circulating again

I feel obligated to reblog this because my health is in the piss-poor state that it’s in partly because of a lack of awareness of things like endo. I never knew that my long, heavy, painful periods weren’t normal. I thought it was this bad for everybody and I was just a weenie who couldn’t handle it. The truth is, around 10% of people who have periods have endometriosis- it’s really common, and yet so many people know nothing about it.

So here are some common symptoms of endo:

I have nearly all of them, but you don’t have to have all or even most of them for it to be worth raising it with your doctor. If your periods or the other health issues they trigger are having a significant effect on your life, that’s reason enough to ask whether that can be helped.

“lives in my head rent-free” is such a strange expression. Does anything in your head actually pay rent?

the little mouse who lives in my frontal lobe is my only source of income

Gardien

I’m pretty sure you don’t need to know French in order to understand this comic.

My local garden center had a strict “mask policy enforced by owner’s mother with a garden hose” and the woman really did, and I say this with adoration and aspiring to be like her someday- look like a wizened and moderately sadistic gargoyle perched on her lawn chair with the hose cocked, pressure building behind the nozzle, eagerly awaiting the next asshole.

always relevant

Imagine the self delusion necessary to think you can try AOC on Twitter without being humiliated.

Silk & Steel, aka Sapphics Who Stab

<deep breath>

Alright, friends. It’s been a whirlwind couple of days and I am beyond blown away, but let’s start at the top.

Hello. My name is Macey, and I’m real gay.

So, last July, I saw this picture by artist @al-norton​ on twitter. It was gorgeous. Two ladies, one in uniform threatening the be-gowned high femme with her sword. ‘Wow,’ I said to myself, and the internet, ‘I love them.’ And then, ‘but what if we did an anthology full of weapon sapphics and high femmes tho’.

What if indeed.

You gotta understand, I’ve said that before. ‘What if we did an anthology.’ Of tree ladies. Of bone sorcerers. Of airship pirate wizards. No one ever took me all that seriously, before. (Hello, I am your neighbourhood Type A disaster sapphic. Over-commitment is my middle name ^.^;)

But this time… people liked the idea. A lot.

So we decided to put together a kickstarter. We commissioned the cover art you can see up top, from @artbyalexis​, and checked if Al was okay with us citing her inspiration & buying rights to show her art. And then we asked all those writers who were so stoked on twitter whether they really meant it - figuring that some of them were probably, well, over-excited.

Nope. They meant it. Claire Eliza Bartlett. Aliette de Bodard. K.A. Doore. Jennifer Mace (yup, it’s me!). Freya Marske. Kelly Robson. Nibedita Sen. Django Wexler. JY Yang. All of them. We had a table of contents.

We posted our kickstarter on October 28th, with a modest goal of $6,000 to pay our authors, artists, and editors, and an ambitious $12,000 stretch goal to put on an open call for submissions and pay everyone professional rates. We figured if we started strong, we could maybe get to $6k in the first day or two, and slowly strive for $12k (which I particularly wanted, because we promised ourselves enamel pins at that point!) over the course of the month.

We funded to $12k in 12 hours.

As I write this, 37 hours in, we’re at $20,000. We’re in talks with authors whose names make me pinch myself. We’re working to bring in even more artists, and expand our open call to bring the book up closer to 100,000 words - which would allow for half our content to be from unsolicited writers. (Perhaps writers like you.)

I’m beyond words, I’m so happy. I never expected that stories about queer women - queer women having adventures, stabbing things, wrangling diplomatic missions or running space stations or falling in love over the bones of a dragon - could get this kind of response.

Thank you. All of you, thank you so much. And please consider joining us, and continuing to show the world: stories like this matter, and are wanted, and are beautiful.

So uh. Exciting news!! We added a whole bunch of new stretch goals! More artists! More wordcount!! Including, at $31k, a brand new story by Yoon Ha Lee (of Ninefox Gambit & the rest, which is extremely queer and extra eldritch space warfare with resurrection and political shenanigans and MATH MAGIC, y’all should get on that), which is only $3k away at this point!!! plz, y’all. Yoon’s amazing.

…not only did we earn a new Yoon story (omg) we uh. Somehow. Persuaded Ellen Kushner to write for us if we hit $35k.

You WHAT.

Octobit Day 4: Spacesuit

an assortment of cubes

William Russel Flint

Hellenic inspiration, Villa Kerylos, Nice

THIS is how I want to live

imagine owning an independent bookstore with a cafe and bakery with a cat that sleeps on the windowsills and people like to pet her while they browse the shelves

What if we kissed in Bath c. 1815 after over seven years of separation, heartache and regret because our early engagement was ended (and we are a Royal Navy captain and a baronet’s daughter) 🤔 

Y’know, NaNoWriMo isn’t actually about getting 50,000 words in 30 days

Yeah, that’s the Goal – but it’s not what it’s about

NaNoWriMo is about sitting down, starting a project, and learning to manage that project and keep going even when it gets hard

it’s about building skills and forming habits and developing discipline and learning more about yourself as a creator so you can get a sense for what writing methods do/don’t work for you

its about trying things – about making discoveries and making mistakes, and about making progress without getting mired in the minutia so you end the month with more words than you had when you started

It’s framed like a contest ‘cause goals and prizes make things fun, but you’re only really playing against yourself

50,000 words is only a target to shoot for ‘cause without a target it’s pretty hard to practice your aim

It is, and I cannot stress this seriously enough, also about making the people in your life respect your writing time.

It’s also about finding a community.

Writing is a lonely business. Ninety percent of your time is spent in front of your computer or at your notebook, dragging words out of your head and forcing them onto paper. If you don’t have people in your life who are encouraging and supportive and understanding, it’s ten times harder.

NaNoWriMo gives you access to a worldwide community of writers just like you.

Engaging with the NaNoWriMo community is how I met some of my closest friends and critique partners. It’s how I joined fandom. It’s one of the reasons I volunteer for NaNoWriMo every year now: because I want to give other people the encouragement to follow their dreams to write a novel.

Maybe it gets published. Maybe it doesn’t. But for many of the people I’ve seen, publication isn’t necessarily the end goal. It’s about finally starting the project that you always said you would, and finding a group of like-minded people who are in the same boat. 

Writing a novel will never be easy. But when you have a community with you, it sure as hell helps.

sunrise color change

by Denny Bitte

Fading colours

niiloi