A LOVER OF 8

[oddarette]

“My Feelings Pour out as if They had Somewhere to go”

[paw2paw]

^O^ 💻💿📟 ִ ۫  ּ   ִ  ۫   ˑ ֗  ִ   ˑ   

[oddarette]

Ah the rare teacup spill nail. They don’t live very long because it’s difficult to hold their shape. They sure are beautiful though.

[morienwind]

888?88888!888, 888888......

[reecypontiff]

Interested in getting into the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels but don't have the time or inclination for all that pesky reading? Well fanboy A.A. Mitchell made audiobook versions of four out of five of the first books in the series, available free at the links below!

The Eight Doctors by Terrence Dicks

Vampire Science by Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum

The Bodysnatchers by Mark Morris

War of the Daleks by John Peel

(I highly recommend Vampire Science instead of the Eight Doctors as a jumping-off point for new readers to the series)

[reecypontiff]

It seems these links are now defunct, but fortunately @walks-the-ages has rescued them from the depths of the Internet!

https://www.tumblr.com/walks-the-ages/757536832075530240/doctor-who-more-fan-made-audiobooks-heroic

[crazypigeonenjoyer]

[mollybeenoel]

“What’s the most impressive and stressful thing you’ve seen?”

Me:

Source

[theriu]

That looks SO dangerous but I am SO impressed and UTTERLY charmed and FULL of childlike wonder

[yeehawpim]

a comic about printers

I remember seeing a post a couple months back of someone talking about printer troubles and companies making them bad deliberately, like pointlessly different screw sizes and a lying no-usb-compatibility sticker

If someone knows it please tell me, I'm pretty sure I remember it had good resources on a youtube channel that teaches you how to fix stuff!

[ascendingconures]

"Paul Mcgann sighted at bad wolf studios!!!"

"Paul Mcgann sighted filming on a beach in Cardiff with a TARDIS!!"

[heretolurkbutalasitstaken]

OH NO IT'S THE ENEMY

[arsanatomica]

[thundercrackfic]

This post went places I didn’t expect

[donnerpartyofone]

It's hard to say this without sounding like a right wing dickhead, but the thing about progressive spaces is that they may naturally attract people who are always on the lookout for excuses to start a fight. Like you can find yourself faced with someone whose political outrage is totally justified, and whose humanitarian ideals are right on the money, but simultaneously they are carrying a ton of psychological baggage about being wronged and getting revenge, and they will exploit literally any opportunity to live out this psychodrama with anyone in their line of vision. I have thought of several related anecdotes since I started typing this post, but I'll limit myself to the thing that inspired it, which is that I just visited this ultra-lefty cafe/bike shop/community gathering space where I've heard that the proprietor is constantly in a fight with everyone around her. When I paid for my stuff I noticed that there was no tip option, but I thought I had heard something about this, so I snuck away to look at the website and it made me really glad I didn't ask! I think there should have been a really enticing and exciting way for her to say "I've decided to be the change I want to see in the world, so I'm paying my baristas a full living wage, I'm making sure EVERYONE feels welcome and comfortable here, and I'm selling products I believe in!" -- but instead all the web copy sounded more like "You're either with me or against me, you're a fucking piece of shit asshole if you can't handle the inclusive atmosphere here, and by the way tipping is for fascist cavemen and if you ever try to tip someone you are refusing to relate to them authentically and you are enforcing a dangerous and evil power dynamic that should be purged from human society (so therefore I pay my staff well)." Like everything she stood for was totally agreeable, but why did she have to put it like it was directed at her worst enemy, rather than at the kinds of people she wants to attract? If the word on the street is to be believed, the reason for this posturing is that she spends quite a lot of energy making as many enemies as possible, and she probably likes it that way. I guess I'm just reminding myself, and perhaps others, that while one might think of "politics" as being broadly social and theoretical, no individual can fully separate the political from the intimately personal. Even somebody who seems to want to uplift and protect their fellow humans may be getting some perverse inner satisfaction out of that valiant crusade, and you may never realize it until you find yourself in a confusing fight with them.

[author-by-night]

I ran a LARP for a few years explicitly aimed at being queer friendly and accessible, and eventually cut it short mainly for this exact reason. You wouldn’t believe the amount of abuse my staff and I took for reasons that felt genuinely insane. I got called ableist for telling someone they couldn’t be invincible in my game of make believe, more than once. Defended myself, multiple Jewish players, and a conversion student from accusations of antisemitism based on alleged lore we’d never written / suggested / that simply and plainly did not exist in game. Had a staffer try to talk to someone about how a joke she made was uncomfortable only for this person to retaliate in epic proportions full white woman crocodile tears style, trying to get this staffer removed and eventually escalating into a full public hate campaign when she didn’t get her way. All that’s still just the tip of the iceberg.

Progressive spaces are naturally populated by traumatized people, and unfortunately trauma makes people more difficult. (I’m not excluded in that. No one is.) Running a progressive space is doubly difficult because a lot of left-facing trauma was inflicted by authority, so you’re setting yourself up to be the windmill that someone tilts their displaced rage at. I don’t really know what the solution is, but I do know that this is one of the huge reasons it’s so hard to find community: the people with a bone to pick can’t reach the ones who actually hurt them, but they’ll sure find you along the way, and the safer they feel around you the safer they’ll feel coming after you.

[open-sketchbook]

i've made a point that i will never join a serious hobby space that primarily defines itself by its politics, because invariably they explode in short order as everyone inside starts treating whoever runs the place as a ruling class to overthrow, and all discussion collapses into figuring out an exacting definition of their ideology so they can work out who to exclude

i write fiction on a web forum, and for a few years i'd get a DM every few months from somebody leaving to make That Web Forum But Leftistly, and then a few months later I'd learn how that effort exploded.

political spaces are important! but when your social club defines itself by its politics, it rapidly becomes about the politics of who is allowed in the social club. this isn't to say you have to tolerate hate, but a community which can't function in the presence of relatively small and civil disagreement is a bomb waiting for the fuse to be lit

[daughterofheartshaven]

The Doctor Who youtube channel has posted a video yesterday of a bunch of deleted scenes from the most resent season, and of course the original ending to The Reality War isn't there.

The comments section of this is hilarious:

...aaaaaaaaaand my personal favorite:

[ajaxgb]

Okay no I need to talk about the book version of Howl's Moving Castle. I love the movie but the book has such a different vibe and you, yes you, should read it.

Movie Howl is a soulful and quiet. Book Howl is a drama queen and Causing Problems and has a long string of jilted exes and couldn't shut up if you paid him.

Sophie and Howl drive each other up the wall at the beginning and it's really funny. Sophie and Howl are (despite themselves) very much in love by the end and they still drive each other up the wall and it's even funnier.

In the movie, Howl has been ordered by the king to participate in The War, and Howl is avoiding it because he is a brave conscientious objector. In the book, Howl has been ordered by the king to rescue his lost brother from the Witch of the Wastes, and Howl is avoiding it by any means necessary because he is a cowardly weasel who wants to stay as far from the Witch as possible.

In the movie, the Witch cursed Sophie because she was jealous about Howl speaking to Sophie for five minutes. In the book, the Witch cursed Sophie because Sophie had been doing surprisingly powerful magic for years without knowing it and it was actually starting to cut into the Witch's plans. (Sophie does not discover any of this until nearly the end of the book, but the reader can start to pick it up much earlier and the way Sophie's magic works is pretty darn cool.)

In the movie, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens, but this is implied to be nothing but nasty fearmongering. In the book, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens because Howl started the rumor so people would stop asking him to do wizard junk all the time.

The book lightly parodies a couple of tropes from Western fairy tales. In particular Sophie has internalized that, as the eldest of three sisters, her "destiny" is to fail so that her younger sisters will look cooler when they succeed, which is why she's so resigned to the hat shop at the beginning. (Sidebar: Sophie's sisters come up much more in the book and they're great.) There's also a really funny bit where Sophie attempts to operate a pair of seven-league boots.

In the movie, the fourth and final location that the magic door connects to is some sort of black void / mindscape / time portal dealy. In the book the fourth location is Wales, in the UK, on Earth, so that Howl can visit his family, because from Howl's perspective this is an isekai story.

[kayforpay]

history fucked me up

oxford was built and operational as a college before the rise of the mayans and cleopatra lived in a time nearer to pizza hut’s invention than to the pyramids being built

[kayforpay]

I need a noncomprehensive history book that covers Known World History in time periods, like “in this century, all this shit was happening concurrently” and not just all spread out so I have to piece it together like some unpaid uneducated scholar

[archaeologysucks]

You mean like this?

The Timetables of History by Bernard Grun

I grew up with this book, which is frickin’ enormous, and it was endlessly fascinating to young me to pour over the side by side comparison of events taking place concurrently under different headings and in different parts of the world.

Or if you want something you can put on your wall, there’s this:

World History Timeline

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I had this book! My grandpa gave it to me and it was really freakin useful!!

[mckitterick]

I loved this book! Same for The Timetables of Science: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Science.

Same for The Timetables of Technology: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Technology. Great references!

[lepetitpoete]

okay but here’s an even cooler (free!) visualization that goes a step further and tracks ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500

✨️with a special focus on colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure✨️

You can spend hours upon hours exploring this

[contremineur]

Medieval stained glass fragment incorporated in a later window at the church of All Saints, East Barsham (Norfolk)  

image from here

[english-history-trip]

[liivn]

Three Barn Owls at a quatrefoil church window. Photographer: Richard Brooks. Date: July 2009. Shot at a local church in North Norfolk, England.

[fanfeifour]

Falling