Pride icon commissions!

Hi guys, I'm a queer, disabled Jew and I'm unemployed, and I'm strapped for cash, so I decided to open commissions for some pride icons! All of these are my own edits.

Examples of my work, free to use if you reblog the post:

$5 for one, $10 for three, $15 for five! I will make icons of almost any fictional character in front of almost any pride flag*.

Dm me for details!

*Exceptions: pride flags that go against a canon queer character's established sexuality (example: putting Dorian Pavus in front of a bisexual flag), real people, characters from shitty media (as in like h*rry p*tter and like south park), straight pride flags unless I think it's really funny

P. S. It is also my birthday this month 🎂

Icons for @fingertattoos !

(Please ask them permission before using!)

I got this comment on a story from my Other AO3 Account this morning.

(Info redacted because I prefer keeping these accounts separate but no one follows me on the side blog I have for that account.)

The story was posted almost a year ago and is relatively “popular” by my average statistics even though it has tropes and themes that are big turnoffs for a lot of people (hence separate accounts). This popularity is undoubtedly because it’s a Marvel Loki story and that fandom is massive.

So there is obviously an algorithm or a bot scrubbing ao3 statistics and leaving this comment on fics that meet a certain metric with the main character of the fic inserted into the comment.

I had a little time to kill this morning so I decided to investigate further. And y’all this is so predatory. Come on this journey with me. It made me mad. It may make you mad.

First, if you go to Webnovel’s website, you HAVE to choose between male lead or female lead stories before you can go any further. WTF?

And that’s weird, but this gets so much worse. This is basically a pay-to-read site that has different subscription models. Which… okay BUT! The authors don’t get paid! Look at that comment again. They’re promising a supportive and nurturing community, but zero monetary compensation. It’s basically, “post your stuff here so we can get paid and you can get… nice vibes?” I mean look at this Orwellian writing:

Using the phrase “pay-to-read model” in the same sentence as “qualitative changes in lifestyles for authors” deliberately makes you think that you can get paid and maybe even make a living on this website. But that’s not actually what it says and authors will not receive one red cent.

Oh but wait, the worst is still to come. In case this breaks containment (which I kind of hope it does) this is where I mention that I’m a lawyer in the US.

I don’t do intellectual property or copyright law but I do read and write contracts for a living. So I went to look at their terms of service. It was fun!

Highlights the first, in which Webnovel gets a license to do basically whatever they want with content you post on their site. This is how they get to be paid for people reading authors’ writing without paying them anything.

Highlights the second, in which Webnovel takes no responsibility for illegally profiting off of fan fic. This all says that the writer is 100% responsible for everything the writer posts (even though only Webnovel is making money from it).

Highlights the third which say that by posting, the author is representing that they have the legal right to use and to let Webnovel use the content according to these terms. So if a writer posts fan fiction and Webnovel makes money from people reading the fan fiction, and the House of the Mouse catches wise, these sections say that that’s ALL on the writer.

So that’s a little skeevy to start off with but the thing that is seriously shitty and made me make this post was that these assholes are coming to ao3. They are actively recruiting people in comments on their fan fiction. And they are saying they are big fans of the character you’re writing about and that they share your interests.

They are recruiting fan fiction writers and giving every impression that you can make money from posting fan fiction on their site and hiding the fact that you absolutely cannot but they can make money off of you while you try, deep in their terms of service which no one but a lawyer who writes fan fic and has some time to kill will read.

I see posts on here regularly from people who don’t understand how this stuff works, don’t understand that they (and others) can not legally make a financial profit from fan fiction. And there are tons of people who will not take the time to dig into the details.

Don’t deal with these bastards. Fuck Webnovel.

Hey, if you're wanting to make some changes to how you eat, remember- it's much easier, healthier, and more sustainable to ADD foods that make you feel good than it is to REMOVE foods.

If you feel like you don't drink enough non-sugary fluids, it makes more sense to try drinking more tea and sparkling water than it does to just avoid soda. You gotta add in the good (and remember, that the only value food has is how it makes YOU feel. Food is morally nuetral and should be enjoyed.)

Try:

Remember- food is a gift. It should bring you joy, not stress. Trust your body. Enjoy the cookie. Drink something tasty.

This is like, insanely bad advice lmao

add, not replace, nuts to your afternoon snack? wut. also telling people who binge eat to MAKE SURE to eat chocolate everyday is so ill advised when for a lot of people certain foods can trigger binge eating. bad advice

So, I just want to point out-

The WebMD article on preventing binge eating has "plan your snacks" and "having predictable meals" as their first and second suggestions.

The #1 piece of advice on the Heathline article for recovering from a binge eating disorder is to "ditch the diet", include more healthy foods rather than eliminating foods, and "moderating" your snacks, "rather than excluding them all together."

The "Very Well Health" article on avoiding binge eating includes the following advice: Stop restricting yourself and practice intuitive eating, which specifically includes "not categorizing food as good or bad, and the freedom to eat whatever you want."

Look, this post was not specifically aimed at people who are recovering from an eating disorder, and I'm certainly no expert on that topic specifically. Your milage may vary, just like it will vary for people who have specific food sensitives or allergies.

But it seems to me like basically all of the articles on this topic give pretty consistent advice that also...falls in line with what I'm advocating for here- repairing your relationship with food, not assigning foods a moral value, focusing on eating foods that make you feel good, adding foods that make you feel good to what you eat rather than restrictive diets, and even specifically planning your meals with these principals.

Food is a gift. Food should bring you joy. And if specifically allowing yourself, planning for yourself, to eat a dessert with your meals helps you feel good in your relationship with food, then do that. If that specific advice doesn't help you feel good in regards to food, then don't do that. Trust your body.

okay i just realized they meant "fascist" and not atleast 2 other words i can think of that are funnier

#happy pride!

Just Will being a total mess in the morning and Hannibal being obsessed with him (honestly canon)

My Patreon

AU inspired by The Little Mermaid where Ed helps Stede find his way to safety from a storm at sea ⛅️

My Patreon

This does not even begin to cover the weirdness of cathode ray televisions.

They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.

And for eighty years, Americans' favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.

If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.

Servicing them is like disarming a bomb -- their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.

A black-and-white cathode ray TV driven by an unmodulated analog signal is theoretically capable of resolution that would require a microscope to perceive.

Old school CRT monitors had the same issues.

Back when, I worked at a small whitebox pc manufacturer. One day, a service tech brought back an older, gigantic (30 inch or so) AutoCAD monitor from a service call. The customer said "Made me feel nauseous"

So, we put it on the bench and fired it up. You immediately felt the hair on your body stand up, and my co worker put his hand up close to turn the power off, and his hand and forearm started spasming - I yanked the power cord from the wall as the tingle I was feeling began to feel hot.

No idea what was wrong with the thing, but it was kicking out some serious electro magnetic radiation.

Remembering the almost imperceptible high pitched buzzing that let you know the tv was still on even when nothing was on the screen. Also putting your forearm near the screen and watching the hairs stand up

It's a few dozen kilovolts of charge stored in a CRT, but that's what flings the electrons from the guns at the back to the phosphors on the screen. The key is to discharge the tube safely before servicing, and when you've got to do certain calibrations while it's powered on (like convergence alignment), you use insulated tools and follow the one-hand rule: only let one hand into the chassis at a time. The idea is not to give the electricity a path to discharge from one arm through your heart out the other arm. I tend to keep one arm behind my back while working on CRTs as a result.

@modmad​

been tryin to tell people for years CRT tvs are cryptids

Too easy to believe. Anybody else remember when you turned the TV off, and the image collapsed into a little white eye-looking dot that faded slooooooowly away... looking at you all the time?

(shiver)

Unironically my favorite thing about the Hannibal universe is that the original watercolor of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun by William Blake is torn up and eaten by a psychotic serial killer obsessed with it. Which means that painting is now considered lost or destroyed in-universe. Imagine being an art historian in the Hannibal canon and trying to keep a straight face while you write about how a 200 year old William Blake painting is gone for all time because some guy in the 1980s fucking ate it and then died shortly after.

Absolutely insane shit, Thomas Harris you madman of an author I love your mind!

i keep thinking about the number of parrots and mimicking birds that say love you! as part of their vocabulary. how often they must hear that in order to learn it as a song.

when i was a child and learning how to train dogs, we were warned against using puppy too much around the dog - it might get confused and think the word puppy was a name. we were supposed to use mostly command words - keep it simple and clear.

but when my dog is in the middle of a nightmare, i say i love you to him, and he calms down. i say i love you! and he starts wiggling, delighted. when i first rescued him, i love you got no reaction. he understood i love you! before he understood what stairs are. the first thing i ever trained him to understand, maybe, before even his name: i love you.

my sister used to say i love you! and her cat would come running. he knew his name, too, but her voice saying i love you was enough.

there's some debate about how many words our pets understand. maybe they understand the tone more than the actual word. science almost always seems to be coming out with new exciting information about just how much animals can learn and understand language. it often more seems that the only true barrier is that we don't understand them when they answer back.

goblin doesn't know it yet, but for the last 3 days, i've been telling him about the new bed i bought him. i had to save for a while in order to afford it - but it's specifically for big dogs like him, and (supposedly) won't flatten out after 6 months. it was twice as expensive as my own mattress, and i'm way-too-excited to give it to him. i keep reading him the stats - it says it'll help any joint pain! and one more sleep until it comes! he wiggles in joy at the tone in my voice, this thing i know i'm not really communicating, but something he seems to understand-anyway.

as of 7:30 AM today, the new bed is on the way. goblin is asleep on my couch, happily snoring. the truck is two towns over. i keep refreshing the delivery updates.

something about telling these creatures in our lives i love you, even knowing they can't understand exactly. even knowing each word in that phrase holds a concept maybe-outside of real communication's possibilities - to understand "i/you", to understand love, to understand holding love and passing it through you into something else. knowing, really, we've probably trained them with this phrase comes petting. and then saying it, over and over and over through the little lonely hours of our day.

hoping, with repetition and action and practice: we'll find a way to tell them anyway.

I'm serious when I say the United States is actively hostile to children. Constant school shootings our leaders refuse to do anything about. Child Protective Services that overwhelmingly do nothing of the sort. No healthcare. Our education system is abysmal. Very few areas in the public that are safe for children to be in. Large swaths of states making gender affirming care for trans kids a felony. Child marriages are legal in a lot of states. Treating kids like property parents have every right to do whatever they want to, to the point where the U.S. is one of the very few countries that refused to ratify the U.N.'s Convention On The Rights Of The Child explicitly on the basis that treating children like people erodes the rights of American parents. And now states are enacting laws that overturn child labor laws like it's the goddamn Victorian Age. And even before those laws were made, it turns out that migrant children have been working in factories for a lot of companies, including the supposedly socially-minded Ben and Jerry's.

As complicated as adult life is, I would never want to be a kid again, with no say or agency in my life and completely helpless to the whims of the adults around me.

to extrapolate on CPS, don't forget all the awful and fucked up shit that the foster care system does to kids and families of color, as well as poor kids and families, especially native kids and families!

eminem’s got about lyrics about how the secret service interviewed him, so a journalist FOIA’d info about eminem from the secret service to fact check his rap

it turns out the secret service investigated eminem because of lyrics threatening trump and ivanka

and they really did interview him

and when one of the secret service agents started reading the threatening lyrics out loud eminem started rapping along 

and they noted that

@afloweroutofstone​

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6515270-LEOPOLD-Secret-Service-FOIA-Eminem.html enjoy

I’m sorry to report that this is a W for Eminem

“This cat saying “well hi!” in a southern accent”

(Source)

The caption really doesn’t do it justice.

I laughed so fucking hard at this