What if you could acquire a small magical companion. It is sleek and soft and promotes your mental and physical healing by just being around you, and it's presence deters pests like rodents and insects. It will live up to roughly 20 years and each will have its own distinct personality and markings which may or may not compliment your personality and sense of aesthetics.

This is cat

so much for getting the heck off my page

funny thing about goofball devils saying 'so much for the tolerant left' is idea that i was ever tolerant of them in first place. bud i am NOT tolerant of fascist racist bigots and never have been. if you are into that stuff then dont buy my books and get the heck off my page

Maia face duality lol

Every time she makes that wide open mouth big smile, all I can think of is Bruce Timm’s art of Harley or Poison Ivy.

New generator! Get your weird cities here, 100% artisanally crafted weirdness.

It’s Pride Month Eve, so leave out some milk for Freddie Mercury and his cats.

They’re looking at each other, comparing cats:

And Vincent Price was also bi so, y'know, let’s hear it for the bi pride catboys.

It's June 1. It's time.

Go be gay.

Look if there's one thing, just one thing, that I wish everyone understood about archiving, it's this:

We can always decide later that we don't need something we archived.

Like, if we archive a website that's full of THE WORST STUFF, like it turns out it's borderline illegal bot-made spam art, we can delete it. Gone.

We can also chose not to curate. You can make a list of the 100 Best Fanfic and just quietly not link to or mention the 20,000 RPFs of bigoted youtubers eating each other. No problem!

We can also make things not publicly available. This happens surprisingly often: like, sometimes there'll be a YouTube channel of alt-right bigotry that gets taken down by YouTube, but someone gives a copy to the internet archive, and they don't make it publicly available. Because it might be useful for researchers, and eventually historians, it's kept. But putting it online for everyone to see? That's just be propaganda for their bigotry. So it's hidden, for now. You can ask to see it, but you need a reason.

And we can say all these things, we can chose to delete it later, we can not curate it, we can hide it from public view... But we only have these options BECAUSE we archived it.

If we didn't archive it, we have no options. It is gone. I'm focusing on the negative here, but think about the positive side:

What if it turns out something we thought was junk turns out to be amazing new art?

What if something we thought of as pointless and not worth curating turns out to be influential?

What if something turns out to be of vital historical importance, the key that is used to solve a great mystery, the Rosetta stone for an era?

All of those things are great... If we archived it when we could.

Because this is an asymmetric problem:

If we archived it and it turns out it's not useful, we can delete.

If we didn't archive it and it turns out it is useful, OOPS!

You can't unlose something that's been lost. It's gone. This is a one way trip, it's already fallen off the cliff. Your only hope is that you're wrong about it being lost, and there is actually still a copy somewhere. If it's truly lost, your only option is to build a time machine.

And this has happened! There are things lost, so many of them that we know of, and many more we don't know of. There are BOOKS OF THE BIBLE referenced in the canon that simply do not exist anymore. Like, Paul says to go read his letter to the Laodiceans, and what did that letter say? We don't know. It's gone.

The most celebrated playwright in the English tradition has plays that are just gone. You want to perform or watch Love's Labours Won? TOO FUCKING BAD.

Want to watch Lon Cheyney's London After Midnight, a mystery-horror silent film from 1927? TOO BAD. The MGM vault burnt down in 1965 and the last known copy went up in smoke.

If something still exists, if it still is kept somewhere, there is always an opportunity to decide if it's worthy of being remembered. It can still be recognized for its merits, for its impact, for its importance, or just what it says about the time and culture and people who made it, and what they believed and thought and did. It can still be a useful part of history, even if we decide it's a horrible thing, a bigoted mess, a terrible piece of art. We have the opportunity to do all that.

If it's lost... We are out of options. All we can do is research it from how it affected other things. There's a lot of great books and plays and films and shows that we only know of because other contemporary sources talked about them so much. We're trying to figure out what it was and what it did, from tracing the shadow it cast on the rest of culture.

This is why archivists get anxious whenever people say "this thing is bad and should not be preserved". Because, yeah, maybe they're right. Maybe we'll look back and decide "yeah, that is worthless and we shouldn't waste the hard drive or warehouse space on it".

But if they're wrong, and we listen to them, and don't archive... We don't get a second chance at this. And archivists have been bitten too many times by talk of "we don't need copies, the original studio has the masters!" (it burnt down), or "this isn't worth preserving, it's just some damn silly fad" (the fad turned out to be the first steps of a cultural revolution), or "this media is degenerate/illegal/immoral" (it turns out those saying that were bigots and history doesn't agree with their assessment).

So we archive what we can. We can always decide later if it doesn't need preserving. And being a responsible archivist often means preserving things but not making them publicly available, or being selective in what you archive (I back up a lot of old computer hard drives. Often they have personal photos and emails and banking information! That doesn't get saved).

But it's not really a good idea to be making quality or moral judgements of what you archive. Because maybe you're right, maybe a decade or two later you'll decide this didn't need to be saved. And you'll have the freedom to make that choice. But if you didn't archive it, and decide a decade later you were wrong... It's just gone now. You failed.

Because at the end of the day I'd rather look at an archive and see it includes 10,000 things I think are worthless trash, than look at an archive of on the "best things" and know that there are some things that simply cannot be included. Maybe they were better, but can't be considered as one of the best... Because they're just gone. No one has read them, no one has been able to read them.

We have a long history of losing things. The least we can do going forward is to try and avoid losing more. And leave it up to history to decide if what we saved was worth it.

My dream is for a future where critics can look at stuff made in the present and go "all of this was shit. Useless, badly made, bigoted, horrible. Don't waste your time on it!"

Because that's infinitely better than the future where all they can do is go "we don't know of this was any good... It was probably important? We just don't know. It's gone. And it's never coming back"

What what it's the end of May! That means...New Patreon packs are up! This month's star tier is available for these illustration/digital paper backdrops. Made these for doing character portraits/tarot style illustrations, but some I made special just for this month's reward. Use them as-is, or mix and match! Also, available this month are the full resolution, clean/textless pages from the opening flashback of Chapter 2. Page 5-8 for all your Lyra and impressionable young Maia gandering. A note since there was some confusion over my art nouveau asset pack: I make all of these myself! No bullshit A (or) I involved. If you support my patreon or buy my packs, you support a real artist (who may or may not be a colony of rats in a trench coat.) These are all done in Procreate. You can head on over to here to pick up the backdrop set. Or here to hoover up all the brushes, artwork, assets and goodies in general!

Ok I dug around and it looks like they’re working from Alyssa Creates’ Sun and Moon granny square pattern. I found the star on Alyssa Creates’ youtube channel

After months of research and development and market testing and perfecting the first item I feel confident selling online, I have realized... that it is an incredibly niche item that only a specific subset of absolute nerds would want to buy, and I will have to do a ton of explaining the basic idea over and over again before people generally get what it is I'm even selling. RIP me

Long story short: I'm selling embroidery patterns. You stick them on fabric, embroider them, and wash the pattern away to leave your embroidery shining in solitary splendour.

Long story long... here goes.

i think this is a product worth being proudly enthusiastic about! embroidery is a great hobby that lots of people can, or should, be interested in, and this looks like a great on-ramp for learning. especially because with the stick-on interfacing, you can apply to it skirts and jackets instead of just doing it on stiff embroidery fabric. i’m going to get some for myself!

🏳️‍🌈 Queer Games Bundle 2023 is live now! 🏳️‍🌈

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It’s so fascinating to me that we’ve only been breeding Komodo dragons in captivity for thirty years. In that time, our understanding of them has actually really revolutionized the way we understand the social lives and behaviors of lizards in general, and it’s mostly thanks to this lady right here, who was born 30 years ago on September 13, 1992.

Kraken was the first Komodo to be bred in captivity. She hatched out at GMU, but was raised at the National Zoo. Her parents were wild-caught dragons- there’s still WC dragons in the AZA today- and this one specific individual probably did more to revolutionize lizard care in professional settings than any other individual lizard throughout zoo history.

Until Kraken, social enrichment wasn’t a thing people thought about. It wasn’t something anybody felt was necessary for lizards, because they were just… lizards. Sure, some keepers would play with their favorites, but it wasn’t until the National Zoo started documenting what she was doing that anybody realized how much Komodo dragons like to play with us too.

Kraken’s not in that video, but she’s the one who inspired all of the social studies that have been done on captive Komodo dragons. When she was at the National Zoo, her keepers  started getting curious when, for no apparent reason, she kept gingerly stealing things from peoples’ pockets and tugging on their shoelaces. So they started giving her stuff- Frisbees, blankets, soda cans, anything she showed an interest in.

She played with them, just like a mammal might. The way play behavior is described in psychology is a given activity that’s voluntary, repeated, and conducted under “relatively benign” circumstances. Keeper staff found that her conduct during the study met all of these criteria. “Kraken,” they wrote, had clearly demonstrated “play-like behavior with objects and even with humans (tug-of-war).” Moreover, she “could discriminate between prey and nonprey” while showing “varying responses” with different items (rubber rings, shoes, etc.). (There’s an excellent book on Komodo dragons that has an entire chapter devoted to her.)

Kraken died several years ago, but her legacy continues today. There’s several of her descendants still in the AZA, and the intelligence and social needs she demonstrated led to the improvement of life for these guys- and other lizards. The Komodo dragon program has been an eye opener, not just for reptile conservation, but for understanding reptile intelligence and how this incredible clade of animals functions.

@tyrantisterror

Guys I have spoken to teens on this website and it never occurred to me before but

How are the kids finding us these days

Y’all seeing the memes and posts on other platforms and just following over? Are we “cool” again? I’ve only been back since mobile was a feasible option but I find this fascinating from an anthropological perspective

I’ve got a decade on most of my cousins and I doubt any of them have even heard of tumblr but they’re hitting 20s now so have we looped back around?

Guys is tumblr retro????

Please do not tell me your actual age just give me the vibes

Young bull elephant politely stepping over a walkway at a nature preserve 

(Source)

I get a feeling that he must have stepped squarely on the last one and gone through it.

This is definitely the big steppy of someone who has broken the thing before

Witcher dads have strong hearts and strong arms

As someone who is unrepentantly ~wild and zany~ it feels strange to admit that being stereotyped as ~wild and zany~ is a major insecurity. It always made me feel like shit when I was younger and my social groups would assign each other archetypal roles or character associations and I would indelibly be pigeonholed as The Kooky One. It wasn’t that I was offended to be perceived as eccentric—it just felt like, in Pip’s words, other people assigned their own inability to or disinterest in understanding me as a static trait that I possess.

I know full well that I’m weird, often flamboyantly so, and in such a way that I can be extremely offputting to people with more restrained personalities. But I have interiority! I have depth of feeling! I still value the regard of others! It stings to realize that someone is not willing to even attempt to reciprocate empathy because their perception of me is flattened into a caricature of impenetrable kookiness.

Like yeah man I can see why I annoy the shit out of you but if impulsive Dracula impressions, some odd statements, and moonwalking down the IKEA lighting aisle are all it takes for you to stop seeing someone as fully human or deserving of basic respect, I think maybe we both have insufferable personalities.

To be clear, I don’t mean this in an ableism way—I don’t NOT mean it in an ableism way, but also I resent the implication that odd behavior must be explained by diagnosable medical conditions before those displaying it are deserving of empathy. Just a pet peeve in the way we talk about neurodivergence on this webbed site.

This is the university as it exists now, "Where Badass Bachelorettes & Boss Babes Have It All."

Here's the archive.

This is killing me. I was just going to talk about how her (pollyannawrites on tiktok) writing advice is shit and predatory and how no one should give her money and I've ended up reading all of this. What the fuuuuck.

This is the person responsible (under the name P. K. Mancini) for the now-infamous and deleted (but preserved by others...) TikTok in which she encourages independent authors to force reviewers to sign contracts guaranteeing they will review the ARCs they've been sent...or be sued.

Foz Meadows over at Twitter has been looking into what she's been up to, and (as far as I know) has done the deepest dive so far. I heartily recommend Foz's long and detailed Twitter thread for more info.

Let's talk about this woman's grift. What are her influences? Who is she targeting?

First, let's take a look at some screengrabs from the links so kindly provided above.

Already we've got new-age revival imagery. Not the new age proper, but it's late 2000s child. This version of the new age is stripped of it's bizarre orientalism and appropriative native American imagery in favor of a sleek, ultra-marketable apple-store cleanliness. It's spiritual enlightenment for the on-the-go information age. We've got distant flavors of Hellenic polytheism and vague feminist imagery. Just from this title card we know that this woman is aiming for upper-middle-class women.

This third bullet caught my eye. "6 or 7 figure business" is an important brick here. The New Age Revival has a massive amount of influence from the rise of the pyramid scheme, and multi-level marketing scams.

Fun fact, most of the people who stormed the capital on January 6th had declared bankruptcy from at least one failed small business. People like this woman prey on boostrappers; people with enough spare income and time to start a small business. This language, however, is specifically targeting women.

You can see this same flavor of occult-grifter language in things like prosperity gospel, and the parallel evolution of spirituality and late capitalism.

This wasn't terribly useful to me, but I thought it was funny that this was how the image was cropped on the website. This image is unedited. Money Magi for female entrepreneu.

I also appreciate any use of "quantum" in info-age occult nonsense. It's like how occultists used "electro" back when electricity was first discovered.

Now this was fascinating for me. You see extremely similar language in product listings for Gweneth Paltrows GOOP. The playful, almost saccharine, yet paradoxically chaste use of sexual language is a common theme when you're shooting for upper crust women to grift. You want to portray yourself as socially liberated, pleasure-loving, free, but without any of the wonderful sweat, dirt, and grime inherent to human sexuality.

"Raise your rates without guilt, fear, or persecution" is a perfect example of the same dynamic. The type of person this grift is intended for is someone who with the means and ability to start a small business, but who cannot let themself become aware of the inherent need for hard-nosed decisions inherent in a small business.

The occult language is a smokescreen. This is a grift targeted towards upper middle class women who want the freedom of a small business, but none of the responsibility or messiness that comes with it.

Case in point.