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The Stars My Destination

@mckitterick / mckitterick.tumblr.com

Christopher-McKitterick.com. Science fiction, personal growth, writing, urban wildlife, equality, astronomy, mental health, the human condition - original content and lotsa reblogs. Fandoms include Alien, ATLA, Babylon 5, Leverage, Lilo & Stitch, Mad Max Fury Road, Pacific Rim, Star Trek, Star Wars, & more. SF, poetry, & nonfiction writer - my newest short fiction won the AnLab Reader's Award. Educator, intersectional feminist, autodidact, resto-modder, neurodivergent, astro-guy, animal rescuer, public speaker, & director of the Ad Astra Institute for Science Fiction & the Speculative Imagination. He/they, not gender-conforming. Doing what I can to make our world a little better. I curate tags to serve my students & y'all. Many thanks to generous patrons who support my posts here and on Patreon. Feel free to ask anything!

Speculative fiction writing workshop June 18-30

~ call for applications ~

Learn to write SF that sells. Using the short-story form, we help you master the elements that create great fiction.

hi folks! there's still room in my intensive summer SF writing workshop held in lovely Lawrence, Kansas, over the final two weeks of June

I lead the workshop, and this year's special guest instructor is experimental particle physicist and science-fiction expert Phil Baringer, who's taught university classes and other professional workshops with me before (he's awesome)

I'm an award-winning SF author, educator, and long-time center director, and I've been teaching this workshop since the 1990s. most alums end up publishing or even starting magazines and book publishing companies of their own, and the growing community of alums are super active beyond our time together

we're taking applications for a couple more weeks or until we fill the roster - if you'd like to get that boost you need to start publishing professionally (or just want to grow your skills as an author), why not join us!

thanks to SFWA and generous friends, scholarships are available

(charming spaceship and sunflower art by Kij Johnson)

its always really funny when this happens but it's even funnier when it's not me who took this username

oh come the fuck on

[Image Description: Two screenshots from a sign-up page on a website. The username inputted was "fuckyouformakingmesignup", which got an error message of "This username is already taken". The second screenshot shows the username "fuckyouformakingmesignup2", with the same error message. End ID]

Alright this is rly sad but here goes. I started doing my once-in-awhile bot purge from my followers list. And. I used to be able to just quickly scan and see the bots. They were the ones with default icons and generator-sounding names like "noun-girl-827". And if you weren't sure, you could click on the blog and it would be immediately obvious it was a bot because there's either just bad porn click bait, or nothing there.

Well. This time I had to give up immediately because I got like ten followers down the list and was having immense trouble figuring out who's a bot and who's real. Never ever used to see this but like 5/10 of the first few followers I checked on had just totally empty blogs. It wasn't until I'd already blocked 2 - assuming bots bc empty blogs - that I thought to check if they had any likes. And bam! There it was. All of their user activity.

We have people on this website now who have never reblogged a single post.

Y'all, I'm sure you're sick of seeing "you have to reblog thing" but you literally have to reblog things. That is how this website works. You understand that, right? How do you think the post you hit "like" on got in front of you? It wasn't because you liked enough things and Tumblrs algorithm figured out what you like enough to hand it to you. It's because you followed someone, a human person, who reblogged that post. And it came from another person who also reblogged it.

You are killing this website by refusing to interact with it in the way that makes it better than the other websites you ran from to come here.

Anyway, I'm sure you're all nice people, but I'm not going to play the "bot or not" game if you have an empty blog I'm going to block you.

and remember, reblogging doesn't mean you need to add anything, just sharing stuff you like. also, if you have something to add but you're feeling shy, you can put your thoughts in the tags instead, so only your followers and those who look at the notes see it!

Anonymous asked:

best advice i ever got as a writer was to pick a hobby that i hated more than writing and stick with it. i’m a runner now and it’s miserable and i Hate It and writing is so lovely in comparison. bonus: i’m in excellent shape and running gives you a lot of time to think about writing. i’ve solved a lot of plot complications while running.

This is such funny advice. Writing is so excruciating, you gotta take up Self Torture so that writing feels like a fun little break 😭

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Are you struggling with being a writer? Well Have You Tried Poison Testing As A Hobby,

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I understand the reassurances that have been going around mean well, but no, the situation with fanfiction.net is not just a case of ordinary domain spoofing.

You cannot purchase a subdomain separately from its parent domain. If fanfiction.net and www.fanfiction.net are currently resolving to different sites right now, it's because whoever has control of the parent domain, fanfiction.net, fucked up.

This doesn't necessarily mean anything untoward is going on. For example, the site could be in the process of changing hosting providers, and whoever was responsible for updating the domain's configuration accidentally pointed the bare domain and the www subdomain to different places. That happens all the time.

Given that the preponderance of evidence is that fanfiction.net's hosting has not been actively maintained for some time, however, this could also be a sign that things are falling apart even further. It'd still be a good idea to back up your stuff, just in case!

Yes, please back up your shit from ffnet. And then find a better site because ffnet has been dogshit for years

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I’m losing my fucking mind there’s a whole god damn online database full of illustrations for illuminated manuscripts, you don’t need a subscription or anything. And it has a search function so you can enter key words for whatever you want to see. Right now I’m looking for fucked up illustrations of the apocalypse in Revelations, like so;

If you click the images on the website they come out super high def too. They also have a couple bestiaries, as well as some illustrations of the Divine Comedy. This is my new best friend I’m so fucking excited

yes. excellent.

I think there must be lots of people who need this?

@profestriga more stuff to pass onto the scadians

Actually, gonna reblog this again because I have a great addition.

This website has a massive collection of classical Japanese paintings. I found it while doing costume research for a painting, and it’s glorious.

Why am I unable to vibe with all the accounts that post "nature" and "forest aesthetic" pics

Y'all don't understand

Most of the pics you see of "Forest" are of BABY forest

The trees are small and young

And half of them are straight-up timber/wood pulp plantations

Even the forest where I work is baby...there are so few left of the OLD forests with BIG trees

Y'all want to see REAL BIG TREES??

Everyone thinks the Eastern USA has trees that are small and pathetic, because almost all our old growth was destroyed, and all anyone ever sees is pictures of young woodlands that grew back after the devastation of the logging

But in rare hidden places

There are patches of old growth forest and truly ancient trees

And they are

BIG

Old growth forest near me feat. A tall friend of mine

AUGH SYCAMORE

They used to get up to 14 feet wide...

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this is stupid but I genuinely worry that kids ARE being priced out of video games like. totk is heavily sanitized to maintain a particular rating that often works against itself but like, I struggle to imagine the kid who's approaching their parents like "one hundred dollars for a video game please" my biggest gaming triumph was in high school when my parents bought us an xbox 360 and one game. we got the wii as it was going out of style and played primarily gamecube games on it, and even back then to buy a new gamecube game or a DS game was a twenty dollar endeavour. what kind of slideshow does a ten year old have to present in order to convince their parents to drop a hundie on legend of zelda.

I get OP's point - games have always been expensive, and that's a barrier to young people getting involved. but:

like it's not a hundred bucks where I live

Restored film of San Francisco’s Market Street version of a film shot on April 14, 1906, four days before the Great Earthquake, and the attempt to colorize and sharpen the video-converted film.

Oh wow that’s incredible

I love the guys at the end who are all like “Oh hey look, there’s a camera! Hello camera!”

I’ve seen these restored films going around, but without credit. The original 13-minute film is A Trip Down Market Street, which was shot and produced by the Miles Brothers. It was preserved in the Library of Congress and Prelinger Archives, and in 2018,  Adrianne Finelli scanned and uploaded the footage for the Internet Archive. Now in 2020, Denis Shiryaev restored, upscaled and colorized the film. Shiryaev’s channel has even more restored footage, so check it out if you’re interested.

Remember to source and credit works that are not your own and respect the process and people that gave us this literal glimpse back in time.

THANK YOU.

This is spectacular work.

The GOP wonders why young people (and others) don't want to vote for them. Some wise scribe assembled this list.

1.) Your Reagan-era “trickle-down economics” strategy of tax breaks for billionaires that you continue to employ to this day has widened the gap between rich and poor so much that most of them will never be able to own a home, much less earn a living wage.

2.) You refuse to increase the federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour (since 2009). Even if it had just kept up with inflation, it would be $27 now. You’re forcing people of all ages but especially young people to work multiple jobs just to afford basic necessities.

3.) You fundamentally oppose and want to kill democracy; have done everything in your power to restrict access to the ballot box, particularly in areas with demographics that tend to vote Democratic (like young people and POC). You staged a fucking coup the last time you lost.

4.) You have abused your disproportionate senate control over the last three decades to pack the courts with religious extremists and idealogues, including SCOTUS—which has rolled back rights for women in ways that do nothing but kill more women and children and expand poverty.

5.) You refuse to enact common sense gun control laws to curb mass shootings like universal background checks and banning assault weapons; subjecting their entire generation to school shootings and drills that are traumatizing in and of themselves. You are owned by the NRA.

6.) You are unequivocally against combatting climate change to the extent that it’s as if you’ve made it your personal mission to ensure they inherit a planet that is beyond the point of no return in terms of remaining habitable for the human race beyond the next few generations.

7.) You oppose all programs that provide assistance to those who need it most. Your governors refused to expand Medicaid even during A PANDEMIC. You are against free school lunches, despite it being the only meal that millions of children can count on to actually receive each day

8.) You are banning books, defunding libraries, barring subject matter, and whitewashing history even more in a fascistic attempt to keep them ignorant of the systemic racism that this nation was literally founded upon and continues to this day in every action your party takes.

9.) You oppose universal healthcare and are still trying to repeal the ACA and rip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans and replace it with nothing. You are against lowering the cost of insulin and prescription drugs that millions need simply to LIVE/FUNCTION in society.

10.) You embrace white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and other groups that are defined by their intractable racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. You conspired with these groups on January 6th to try to overthrow the U.S. government via domestic terrorism that KILLED PEOPLE.

11.) You oppose every bill aimed at making life better for our nation’s youth; from education to extracurricular and financial/nutritional assistance programs. You say you want to “protect the children” while you elect/nominate pedophiles and attack trans youth and drag queens.

12.) You pretend to be offended by “anti-semitism” while literally supporting, electing, and speaking at events organized by Nazis. You pretend to hate “cancel culture” despite the fact that you invented it and it’s basically all you do.

13.) Every word you utter is a lie. You are the party of treason, hypocrisy, crime, and authoritarianism. You want to entrench rule by your aging minority because you know that you have nothing to offer young voters and they will never support you for all these reasons and more.

14.) You’re so hostile to even the notion of helping us overcome the mountain of debt that millions of us are forced to take on just to pay for our post K-12 education that you are suing to try to prevent a small fraction of us from getting even $10,000 in loan forgiveness.

15.) You opened the floodgates of money into politics via Citizens United; allowing our entire system of government to become a cesspool of corruption, crime, and greed. You are supposed to represent the American people whose taxes pay your salary but instead cater to rich donors.

16.) You respond to elected representatives standing in solidarity with their constituents to protest the ONGOING SLAUGHTER of children in schools via shootings by EXPELLING THEM FROM OFFICE & respond to your lack of popularity among young people by trying to raise the voting age.

17.) You impeach Democratic presidents over lying about a BJ but refuse to impeach (then vote twice to acquit) a guy whose entire “administration” was an international crime syndicate being run out of the WH who incited an insurrection to have you killed.

18.) You steal Supreme Court seats from democrats to prevent the only black POTUS we’ve ever had from appointing one and invent fake precedents that you later ignore all to take fundamental rights from Americans; and even your “legitimate” appointments consist of people like THIS (sub-thread refuting CJ Roberts criticisms of people attacking SCOTUS’ legitimacy).

19.) You support mass incarceration even for innocuous offenses or execution by cop for POC while doing nothing but protect rich white criminals who engage in such things as tax fraud, money laundering, sex trafficking, rape/sexual assault, falsifying business records, etc.

20.) You are the reason we can’t pass:—Universal background checks—An assault weapons ban—The ‘For the People/Freedom to vote’ Act or John Lewis Voting Rights Act—The ERA & Equality Act—The Climate Action Now Act—The (Stopping) Violence Against Women Act—SCOTUS expansion.

21.) You do not seek office to govern, represent, or serve the American people. You seek power solely for its own sake so you can impose your narrow-minded puritanical will on others at the expense of their most fundamental rights and freedoms like voting and bodily autonomy.

22.) Ok, last one. You are trying to eliminate social security and Medicare that tens of millions of our parents rely on and paid into their entire lives. And you did everything to maximize preventable deaths from COVID leaving millions of us in mourning.

“the millenium falcon would wipe out the enterprise in seconds” lmao the enterprise is just an innocent science class floating thru space…. all they wanna do is look at some rocks… kiss an alien…. find some space plants….. why would you fight that its not a battleship theyre just nerds…… leave them olone 

A friend of mine saw this and brought up some interesting arguments

so, in other words,

Pretty much.

here have some size comparison

Who wins in a fight, a fully staffed Navy research vessel or your local weed man and his best friend in their souped up VW Bus?

So while it’s true that the Enterprise is not as big as people think, that goes double for the Falcon!

A good way of thinking about the relative size is by using a bridge comparison:

The Enterprise bridge has space for 11 people to work, as well as a significant amount of space between stations to move around comfortably:

[Bridge illustration by Tobias Weinmann via here]

And the whole thing fits in the nipple thing up on top of the saucer:

Meanwhile the Falcon (beloved weed bus) has a cockpit that seats 4, with only 2 main operational stations, and zero floor space:

And since Serenity was mentioned too…

Serenity has a bridge more comparable to La Sirena - with 2 stations at the front and quite a bit of floor space.

And for those interested in a visual comparison:

(Boeing 747 for scale as well as the Delta Flyer because Why Not)

TLDR: The Millennium Falcon is pretty dinky, so I propose *true weed bus status* goes to the excellent smuggling ships of Serenity and La Sirena. The Falcon is herby demoted to man on his weed bicycle with his pet monkey and a gun (to be clear the monkey is Solo)

This is the analysis I am here for