Unmute !

I’ve never experienced something like this and I so wish to do so

Link to the gay porn library of Alexandria.

Happy pride.

This is the best version I've seen of this thread. Reblogging it enthusiastically. :)

Holga Kilgore

I just loved how the DnD movie and Michelle Rodriguez presented to us a very classic barbarian and how good she was. That's insane!

If you like my art, please consider giving me a tip on Buy Me a Coffee

opens box that reads "i wanna draw again". inside lies a note. the note says, "mental illness and difficult circumstances have taken years of interest, accessibility, and skill away from me. i want to forgive myself for that. i want to heal my relationship to my hobbies. i want to feel connected to something that once made me feel good, but the cyclic discouragement is difficult to overcome." i turn over the note. on the back it reads "wannta drawe sexy bodies awooga"

seems like this one really resonated with the artists who dont do art fandom

It was TOUGH!!! Interesting but tough. I also would like to work with his clothes and sword design and drawing bell was the most joyful part of process. We still have not finished, Jiang Wan Yin!!!!

tbh i don't really get why we divide the oceans into different oceans because they're all connected it's the same ocean

no metaphor here just pure confusion...is there a line where one ocean stops and another begins? or is it like a smooth gradient of percentages of one ocean shading into another ocean?

Yes, there is a line. There are confluences you can see and touch and they are NOT subtle in the slightest.

That's the Atlantic and the Caribbean on a particularly pronounced day.

This is the Indian and the Pacific. It's not always this obvious everywhere but the dividing lines are very much there.

Oceans have their own properties as far as temperature and salinity and unless something like a storm or a current forces them to mix they won't. Mostly this applies to vertical mixing and it gives you things like thermoclines and haloclines but water is wierd and won't mix horizontally either.

The ocean basins tend to have their own currents that go in a circle and define that ocean, and those patterns mix the water within that ocean. Like a washing machine.

The Caribbean has a little loop of its own that not on this map, but that current keeps that ocean pretty internally consistent. It's got clear warm water because of the shallow bowl of limestone sand it sits in. Where it meets the Atlantic with wildly different conditions the water is traveling in opposite directions, and it acts kind of like an oncoming lane of highway traffic. Species that have adapted to a narrow band of temperatures and salinities (most fish) can't cross, while species with a stronger homeostasis hang out there on purpose, (marine mammals, turtles, sharks). Plankton, that cannot control their horizontal movement in the water column, are held in their home territories by these barriers.

This is cool as fuck

The “Unamused Older Sibling” Duo

It’s so sad to me that a huge part of the Star Wars fandom still talks about how the Jedi lost their way and one of the main reasons is that the fought in the clone wars.

Because this is a children’s show. For children. And in the Jedi crash episode they literally bring up this argument.

“It takes two to fight”

And:

This old man goes off on them. He chooses peace. But what does his peace look like?

The separatists come in and are like “our planet now” and he’s like “ok fine”

And then they use the planet to test out a HUGE weapon that would killed MILLIONS of innocent people and clones. So already his “peace” is just breeding more violence.

But then they decide to use his people as test subjects.

What he was doing wasn’t “peace” it was compliance. He was aiding colonizers and invaders and then they were going to kill him and his entire community because of it.

The separatists were literally conquering planets and killing and enslaving the inhabitants. You wanted the Jedi to sit back and go “sorry man. We like peace. Can’t get involved.”

I just… how can so many people in this fandom misinterpret something that was shoved down their throats??

#in that same ass arc Ahsoka learns a very simple lesson about attachment to but hey guess who fucking missed that point too#she was worried about Anakin and she wanted to stay by his side and protect him.#but LEAVING anakin. and knowing that he may not make it. is HOW she saved him.#she put the needs of everyone first. if she had let her attachment to Anakin over-rule her logic—#she would have stayed by his side to make HERSELF feel better. which would have helped no one

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality” -Dante

my piece done for the @contract-thewhitewolf zine

I CANNOT EVEN BEGIN TO UNPACK TIM’S NON-RELATIONSHIP WITH HEALTHY EMOTIONAL BOUNDARIES because he just watches Kon fly off and there’s no real context for why he does it like that or why it’s given such weight on the page, like the secret of Kon’s DNA isn’t worth that level of reaction once they get it out in the open between them?? So I am left to conclude that Tim is struggling not to explode with feelings because Oh No Local Bird Boy Wants To Kiss His Best Friend SERIOUSLY THAT IS SOME TENSION THAT IS NOT EXPLAINED BY THE ON-PAGE CONTEXT UNLESS I FACTOR IN THAT TIM IS SO IN HIS FEELINGS THAT HE WANTS TO THROW UP

I saw a post saying that Boromir looked too scruffy in FotR for a Captain of Gondor, and I tried to move on, but I’m hyperfixating. Has anyone ever solo backpacked? I have. By the end, not only did I look like shit, but by day two I was talking to myself. On another occasion I did fourteen days’ backcountry as the lone woman in a group of twelve men, no showers, no deodorant, and brother, by the end of that we were all EXTREMELY feral. You think we looked like heirs to the throne of anywhere? We were thirteen wolverines in ripstop.

My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813

And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like

Some people have been wondering about the raccoon. Listen. Listennn. Don't ask about the raccoon.

But does the racoon survive the Uruk-Hai? Does he curl up on Aragorn's head, or does he go straight to Faramir? Does he bite Denethor?

My friend. My colleague. My brother my captain my king. I too have been pondering this question, and in my mind there can be only one ultimate outcome.

A few months later

All hail the High Warden of Gondor.

Epilogue: It ADORES Faramir.

I’m going to wear this on my head like a raccoon and show everyone

I’ve messed around with AI a little, because I like to understand a thing when I’m formulating opinions on it and I’ve found the best way to do that is to climb into the thing and start pushing buttons. I’ve been unimpressed with ChatGPT; its fiction chops are oddly saccharine, and of course you can’t trust the nonfiction it spits out because everything it says needs to be fact checked. It claims it can’t “lie”, only misinterpret data from the sets it was trained on; devs call the misinterpreted data “hallucination”.

Part of what I was testing was whether it could competently do my job, so that if my boss starts asking about it, I can give him a decent report. I asked it for biographies of a few wealthy people I’ve researched in the past, and it spat out some respectably generic information that was mostly correct. However, most of the people I research now are not like “so rich I’m famous for it” levels of wealthy, and harder generally for me to find information on, as I assumed it would be for ChatGPT. 

So I thought I’d see what it could do with someone more middle class, and asked it for a biography of Sam Starbuck. 

What it returned was like what you would get if you told me “Write a flattering biography of yourself and don’t worry that I’ll be fact-checking anything you say.” It was mostly true, but it hyped up my achievements as an author in ways that I would consider not entirely honest, and said I was also a professional editor and that I had led prestigious writing workshops in the past. That’s plain untrue, but I can see where it would be making that assumption, because my author bio sounds like a lot of other, more famous peoples’ author bios, and I would guess it just pulled in some of their verbiage for color. 

But the wildest part of the bio was that it named three of the novels I’ve written. Or rather, it named two novels I’ve written and one novel that I definitely have not. It said I was the author of a novel called “Like Clockwork”. Just in case I had written a fanfic titled “Like Clockwork” and forgotten about it, I checked AO3 and also asked ChatGPT for a plot summary of Sam Starbuck’s “Like Clockwork”. And sure enough it hallucinated a multi-paragraph summary of an entire novel I’ve never written, on AO3 or anywhere else. (It was not a good summary. Very Generic YA SF Thriller.) 

ChatGPT is very good at one thing: apologizing. When I pressed it about where it found the data it couldn’t say, when I asked why it had made up the plot summary it couldn’t tell me, when I asked if it could show me source links or data it drew on to create “Like Clockwork” it of course would not. But it always said it was sorry…

Anyway, my best theory from googling is that every year there are roughly nine million news stories about how Starbucks Coffee’s holiday cups are back “like clockwork”. 

I suppose I should be glad the novel’s title isn’t Unicorn Frappucino.

the perception of academics as all out-of-touch rich white cis straight men is also absolutely not limited to this website (which plays into it both from a dark academia perspective and from a more anti-elitist/verging on anti-intellectual perspective). it is also 100% a thing on actual college campuses, even when physically face to face with professors who are people of color, women, lgbtq, disabled, and very much plugged in to the workings of the world. there is a profound difficulty in seeing that the people who teach us are in many ways like us. 

there’s such a strong desire to conceptualize students and professors as us (young, progressive, marginalized) vs. them (older generation, privileged, out of touch), that it becomes very difficult to realize that this professor is only 15 years older than you are and is still paying off student loans, the author of this article is gay and comes at this with the experience of having been gay in the 80s, this lecturer is unsure whether they’ll have a job come fall. we’re on the same team.

Joke's on you, suckers – I didn't experience a growing sense of alienation from youth culture as I got older because I never understood youth culture in the first place.

Sometimes you'll see a rambling thinkpiece purporting to set forth universal truths about the Great Journey of Life and you just look at the author and think "you were popular in high school, weren't you?"

pretty niche pet peeve but when people do mdzs or cql aus where the Epic Doom Meltdown crescendo to the tragic backstory played out roughly per a canon, but jiang yanli turned out to survive the stabbing after all, so she's alive

and then jin ling and jiang cheng are the exact same.

is that reasonable? is that how people work? is jiang yanli such a cipher to these fic writers that they genuinely believe her parenting would have no impact on jin ling's development as a person?

do we honestly think she would stay out of jiang cheng's mental health situation so utterly that she wouldn't have any affect on his shit coping strategies, and that even if she did the very fact of her being alive wouldn't impact how he processed his own role in wwx's death???

but seriously it's not just a random happenstance that the first thing wwx says to jin ling is he clearly didn't get competently parented. that kid very clearly didn't get parented.

this is a core part of his characterization! for the symbolism! if that situation is changed he's gonna be different!

give jiang yanli credit for her abilities and if jin ling gets to grow up as her kid, write him as someone who got mommed on.

on reflection, the reason people do this is, logically, that they want jiang yanli alive for the specific purpose of wei wuxian getting her back.

and so all the logic of justifying her not-death and all the period from then until he resurrects to this absolution is just marking time until that reunion; it's inconvenient for her to actually do anything, and necessitate adaptations to other characters and events.

if you want jyl for herself, then this web of interpersonal impacts is going to be your chief interest in the concept of her survival; you're not going to ignore all her relationships just because the resulting characterization work is fiddly and takes effort, because then you won't have any story.

and that's why it's so annoying to me, besides the weird panicky suffocating feeling of empathizing with a jiang yanli who's somehow this utterly powerless, more than ever before--

because i called her a high-impact fridgee in the notes, but pulling her out to slow defrost like this is actually substantially increasing the underlying logic that goes into women-in-refrigerators as compared to the book or show. it's reducing her to nothing but the one single shock of main-character grief.

and jiang yanli's central function in the story is to be mourned and guilted over, yes, but she's not purely a one-punch shock moment. the continued impact of her loss and absence is present within the story on an ongoing basis, a synecdoche for all the grief and loss and rupture that constitutes the conditions for the specific world the story inhabits.

i think it's really fun that mdzs is a largely-pretty-upbeat story that's largely about grief!

and restoring jiang yanli can serve as a sort of telegraphed rotational gesture to say, since she stands for all the things that cannot be mended, only lived with and healed from as scars heal, 'i'm making a softer story for my own comfort/catharsis/etc where they all can, so here she is.'

but it's really demeaning to her to reduce her to just that emotional placeholder, that symbolic function, and make her life and death amount to nothing more, when the original text is for all its glibness about certain things really unusually good about making every character death have its own specific lasting reality, usually of their long, yawning absence.

and that's why beyond the basic illogic and 'hm that's boring actually' this particular fixit fic stratagem always grates on my nerves.

Let’s hear for a woman who had to spend many years hiding that she lended her voice to a doll that has spend the last 60 years inspiring young girls.

her name is chris anthony lansdowne! dont worry, op didnt omit her name, tumblr formatting just makes it so that its cut from the photoset!

“Progress Shark” outside the Australian Museum, ahead of Sydney Mardi Gras/World Pride Festival 2023.

More flags should be inflatable sharks

America moment

People in america need to wake up to the fact they're trying to kill us on a daily bases feeding is things that are illegal in most countries

It probably wasn’t pesticides. It was more likely a difference in the amount of gluten in the bread.

North American bread has a much higher gluten content, because there is a higher gluten content in North American wheat and other grains. This is because the grains need it to survive the generally colder climates of North America, so they’ve been bred to have a higher gluten content, which helps insulate the grains from the cold.

So it’s not that the higher amount of gluten is illegal in other places, it’s simply just not necessary, and so it’s not there.

And so North American people who have gluten intolerances often see relief when they eat European bread, due to it not containing the extra gluten.

This is an incredibly common phenomenon.

If you are a North American with a gluten intolerance, now doubting the legitimacy of that because of this video or screenshot, I promise they aren’t poisoning you, they’re just trying to make sure that people in North America can have their own wheat, flour, and bread without the logistics and high price of shipping it across the Atlantic Ocean.

saw this rbed without this addition (i already knew this but u can look it up if ur unsure) n you guys should rb this version instead! our (meaning American ) government sucks but not EVERYTHING is a conspiracy some things are the way they are for many different reasons and it sucks but it is what it is i promise u American bread isn't being poisoned by the govt .