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My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.

Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?

What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?

Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.

mossbear-minese

I don't remember where I saw this piece of advice so I can't credit it, unfortunately

But it was along the lines of "instead of asking whether something is out of character, ask 'what would it take for this character to do this'"

Which I think fits really nicely with this advice of making the actual action itself also feel in character

abidethetempest

where is my beloved "its ween" pumpkin. i require its presence

partydemoman

Pretty sure this is it?

abidethetempest

YES MY PRECIOUS

ITS FUCKING WEENNNNNNN

abidethetempest

why is this post breaking containment. don’t do this to me

mycroftrh

I think a lot of autistic taking-things-literally goes under the radar because what the diagnostic tests and shit ask about is not what that generally looks like in an adult and often not in kids either and much more importantly it’s not what generally actually causes problems in real life instead of being irritating for caretakers or funny to bullies or easy to diagnose

I have absolutely no issues understanding metaphors or idioms. When someone says their heart is on their sleeve they mean they’re emotionally expressive and openly display their feelings, not that they have a chunk of cardiac tissue on their shirt. I very rarely have issues with sarcasm. I sometimes have issues telling when someone who’s said something mean is about to say “just kidding”, but tbh I think that’s more on them than me.

BUT

My grandmother asked me “Do you know when the trash was taken out last?” and I said “I think Eliot took it out yesterday” and a few hours later she yelled at me for “not taking out the trash when I asked you to” and I was like???? You didn’t ask me????

I dread filling out forms and am crap at filling out diagnostic tests or personality quizzes because there are always questions I don’t know the exact answers to (how am I supposed to know what day I got dental surgery seven years ago?) or don’t understand exactly what they’re asking or the wording’s unclear and they could mean this or the wording says this but I’m pretty sure what they actually meant was this and should I answer what they said or what they meant, and how does everyone else just whip through the form when surely they can’t know all the answers either? Does everyone else remember the day they got dental surgery seven years ago?

I get tangled up by bureaucracy because the rules on the website say that for this you need that and for that you need the other and for the other you need something else for which you need the first thing, and I go in circles for hours or days or weeks or months or years because their stated rules say there is no way to get what I need, and when I talk to somebody else they’re like “just call them?” and I’m like “how could that help? the rules say that what I’m trying to do is impossible”

And all of that? That’s how “taking things literally” ACTUALLY affects your life as an adult. It’s not “haha you think ‘getting under your skin’ means parasites”. It’s “you have real difficulty functioning in the world because everyone else is conveying things through implication and assuming that you know that rules are flexible and questions are approximate and you’re supposed to lie on job applications, and you don’t”.

basiliskonline

jeanjauthor

THIS, writers. Unless your characters are very wealthy (can pay people to be very industrious in growing, spinning, weaving, sewing on their behalf) or live in a post-textile-industrial-revolution world (aka modern/futuristic), they're not going to have that many clothes.

What they will have is protective outerwear. Aprons are a very real necessity for a lot of jobs, from cooking to blacksmithing and beyond.

Women wore aprons and housecoats into the 1940s and 1950s when doing cooking & cleaning because it was still a bit expensive to own a lot of clothes...so this is within 100 years. Within living memory for many folks.

Coveralls were created to protect clothing, and were handed out as uniforms by factories because the workers complained that their own clothes were getting damaged by their workplace. (Unions helped with this, strongly encouraging the companies doing the damage to their regular clothes to step up with replacement garments that could get damaged and then replaced by the company whose work was damaging them.)

Businesses started having their employees wear uniforms to make them look good and as a signature of their company (UPS brown, for example), but unless the design teams are idiots, those outfits are going to be stitched in ways that you can move easily & comfortably while doing your assigned tasks.

In corporate culture in Japan, the salarywomen are often given a uniform dress to wear, and I know of one business that held a work-slowdown because the way the sleeves of those dresses were cut and stitched, they literally couldn't bring their arms forward to type on their computers in a comfortable way. The company balked at replacing the uniforms, until a section manager agreed to let his female workers wear their own "office-dressy" clothes for a day...and productivity leaped forward by over 200%, literally because they could move their arms and position them comfortably.

Another example of those who effed it up are the officers' uniforms for the Germans during WWII, which were focused on looking fashionable--and they were!--but were horrible to don quickly, awkward wear in actual combat, etc, and it took them far too long to "drop trousers" to use the bushes in a swift, efficient, and safe manner. (Not saying they didn't deserve to be shot for supporting such an evil regime, but you should be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that it'll take you over a minute to put your clothes back together enough to run for cover in summer.)

Prior to the 1700s, servants in manor houses & noble estates often did not wear a uniform; they just wore whatever they had, and depended on aprons and watchcoats and whatever to protect their clothes. Then it became a status symbol to put one's servants into uniforms, also known as livery. If you could afford to do that then, by gum-golly, you were wealthy, and people could literally see that you were wealthy!

As for those famous black maid's dresses with white aprons that every manga loves to draw? Black dye was still a bit expensive, but black hid most stains. White aprons were protective, and were to be changed out frequently...and it was far easier to bleach cloth than it was to dye it black, plus the stark contrast was very eye-catching, and since the aprons could be swapped out frequently (very small amount of cloth compared to a whole dress), the fact that your maidstaff were wearing clean aprons was another sign of how wealthy you were, rather than just making the maid wear the apron all day long, progressively getting dirtier and dirtier.

With all this said, how valuable clothing was also affected how armies moved. Throughout most of recorded history, armies were composed primarily of men...but there were almost always 2 categories of women who followed them on the campaign trail. One, of course, was sex workers (for obvious reasons), but the other was Laundresses...and the laundresses would be ransomed first, ahead of the sex workers, if captured by enemy forces. (Not all were women by any means, btw, but the majority were, so I stuck with that gender.)

They worked hard to get the clothing clean, helped with getting leather armor clean, and provided other grooming services such as lice-combing. "But Jean, why would getting the soldiers' clothing clean be that important?" Dudes, dudes, my dudes...if you need to take a piss or a shit, combat will not stop for you. Peristalsis will happen mid-sword-swing. This was one of the sources of "deadly infections killed many of the fighters who went to war," and laundresses literally cleaned that shit up.

When you're a warrior in an army, marching off through the forests of Gaul, you can only carry so many spare sets of clothes because you're also carrying your armor, your weapons, and your rations, etc, etc. You will want to take care of your clothes, because you don't have many replacements, and you won't get many replacements.

So, writers, when you're writing about pre-industrialized cultures...go easy on how many clothes people own. Also realize that accessorizing can make an old outfit look new, which includes small parts of the clothing that can be swapped out for other pieces in a mix-and-match style.

...One last note:

The most expensive, time-consuming part of building a Norse ship to go a-viking on wasn't the actual ship, which took many men 2+ years to craft. It was the sails, which took many people, males and females, 3+ years to spin and weave and stitch together. There are literal stories of brash sailors robbing other norsemen of their sails because thieving it was faster & easier. (It also explains a lot of the fury of certain blood feuds between clans & holdings, if you think about it.)

thaylepo

Bringing this back to writers again, your period fantasy or historic characters are also going to know how to do upkeep and basic repairs on their own clothing. Laundries and tailors might be a thing in their world, but spot-cleaning and being able to mend small tears before they become big ones is crucial when off doing quests or campaigns or world-saving missions or what have you. Garments are expensive to replace. It may be sexy to have your hero discard their bloody, torn, and ruined shirt after a fight, but even if the garment is ruined beyond repair or wearability, woven cloth is still so valuable that it's worth keeping and cleaning to be turned into something else (legwraps, bandages, resewn into a hat, or used as patches to repair other garments, etc.).

We live in an unprecedented era of wastefulness, where our clothing is often so cheap (and cheaply made) that it's barely worth the efgort of repairing once it begins to wear out, and so easy to replace that we end up amassing more than we need of it. Even less than a hundred years ago, this kind of frivolity was reserved for the EXCEPTIONALLY wealthy. Even fairly well off people would continually recycle their old garments again and again. (Think of Cinderella's mice making that old pink dress into something new with just bits and pieces of the sisters' discarded accessories.... taking ribbons or lace or whole sections of an old dress to use in a new one was very common until quite recently!)

And never underestimate the usefulness of rags. If the clothing is beyond all repair or salvage, it has a new life as rags. You can wrap food in them, stuff them in your shoes for warmth and fit, pad your pillow with them, use them for cleaning, for bandages, for tying and belting your drawers, for patches.... rags are invaluable in a world where paper towels and disposable hygiene products do not exist.

alex51324

This, and I'll add, vast secondhand market in clothing. That one simple tunic would cost the equivalent-in-labor of a new car today, and it would change hands as many times as one.

People in Ye Olden Times--the earliest garments we have evidence of, up through the middle ages (and well beyond, for all but the wealthiest people)--didn't wear simple, box-shaped garments because they didn't know how to sew anything fancier.

They did so because a Big Rectangle had the most resale/re-use value, since it could be tied, laced, belted, or otherwise fastened to fit a wide range of bodies. The same garment could be worn throughout pregnancy, as well as before and after. If it was no longer needed, it could be passed down or sold to virtually anyone. And when it became worn at the seams or hems, it could be re-sewn as a slightly smaller rectangle, and still fit a lot of people.

In Renaissance Europe, clothing got a lot more structured--and to a significant degree, this was as a status symbol. If you wore a fitted, short jacket over tights and those silly-looking puffy shorts (or a doublet, nether-hose and trunk hose), everybody who saw you would know that you could afford to buy all that fabric and then waste a bunch of it by cutting it into very specific shapes.

And if it fit well, then they'd also know that you were (probably) the first owner of said garments. Because the clothes were still expensive, they'd still be passed down, but there was a lot more need for clothing resellers, where secondhand clothes could wait for a buyer whose body they would fit. (Used clothing was a common gift or tip for servants, and if it was something they couldn't wear, they'd sell it.) In this way, clothing styles would percolate their way down the class ladder, both in the form of actual garments that had once belonged to a very rich person, and dupes made with simpler/cheaper materials and techniques, and perhaps modified for practicality.

And that's how you get fashion cycles: once something starts showing up on too many of the common people, the rich would move on, either exaggerating the trend to a point that, outside of that fashion context, looks ridiculous--

Like these silly, silly shoes:

(Note: these are probably exaggerated; the name of this picture is "Young Man Meeting Death," and we're presumably supposed to see him as a frivolous type of person who is about to find out why he should have lived a more serious and pious life.)

--or going in a different direction entirely.

So yeah, if you're writing secondary-world fantasy, give some thought to where the clothes are coming from, and how that's going to affect the styles and choices the characters make. If your working-class character in a Vaguely Medieval Fantasy Land is wearing fitted clothing, either that society has magic spinning and weaving technology, or your character is a serious fashionista/o, who is putting in a lot of time and effort into the project.

Similarly, if that type of setting has courtiers in a dazzling variety of impractical and elaborate garments--and several different outfits of it apiece--that implies a significant degree of urbanization and upward mobility, driving a secondhand market for those items, as well as providing the skilled labor to make and maintain those types of clothes. (You know these?

There was an entire trade centered on washing & ironing these things. Separate from actually making them, I mean. It involved tiny, specially shaped irons, and buckets of starch. Royalty or major nobility might have a servant dedicated to this highly specialized labor, and people a little lower on the ladder would send them out to be done. Ideally, you'd have each of your ruffs washed and re-set every time you wore it; people did re-wear them to save money, but they got droopy fast--hence the emphasis, in paintings featuring this trend, of crisp stiffness.)

nerathul

How would this all compare to leather and hide based clothing? As the material doesn't need spinning and weaving, only tanning, cutting and sewing would it be cheaper and more common?

quill-of-thoth

So. Not a tanner or a cloth maker here but - tanning can be very chemically specific. For those curious my perspective is of an animal pathologist's assistant. I have cut up several cows.

You do have the opportunity to amass a lot of leather if you hunt large animals, but post the adoption of farming and herding, most people are not feeding themselves that way. And there is just more small game overall. Leather is not necessarily easier, quicker, or less expensive to make than cloth, it just depends on what resources you have that are most abundant.

So the steps to making leather are as follows:

(Under the cut because, uh. I know this stuff from my job, which is “open a dead animal and let the doctor see what’s wrong with it” and most of it is messy.)

3) Assuming you have completed steps 1 and 2, you need the chemicals to tan the animal. Historically brains have been used a lot. DO NOT DO THIS if you are a modern person who wants to hunt for meat or leather. Prion diseases like CWD live in the brain, as do a lot of viruses that will kill or disable you painfully and slowly. It’s a relatively low risk (compared to things like accidents with your hunting gun) but it’s a risk you do not have to take. Yes, this is why some states want you to turn in the heads of any deer you shoot, regardless of how many points they have. This is part of how we tell you if the deer you shot is actually safe to eat, and not full of said viruses that will kill or disable you painfully. The other thing that you need is a steady location and a fuckton of water, because these bitches need to soak for a long time. Way longer than soak times for retting flax or other plant stem fibers. And in multiple different solutions of the foulest smelling shit that you can imagine: in addition to brains, the steps included soaking in urine, possibly dung if you didn’t have enough brains, salt curing, soaking until the hair is loosened and then scraping all that off, and then the actual tanning, which is soaking it in a high tannic acid tree bark solution until it’s ready. You can skip some of these steps, especially if you are, say, a paleolithic hunter gatherer. But your leathers will degrade faster. They will be less comfortable and less good for your range of motion. So the production of leather is not necessarily less time consuming than cloth. It is also resource expensive at many steps – from start to finish you need animal wealth, mineral and plant resources, time, and a lot of water that you don’t need urgently for something else, like irrigation or watering your livestock. You’ll also want to do your tanning away from where you eat and sleep, because, the odor of fermenting cowhide is not fun. Finally, it is way more difficult at every step to construct a garment out of leather: cutting it, using an awl to punch holes in it so you can actually sew, or boiling it into shape. It’s also a specialized process when it comes to the chemical aspect, more so than cleaning wool or beating flax, both of which you can produce way more of (eventually) as a small household in the middle of nowhere. Spinning and weaving are both activities you can pick at slowly – you can also get a very small child to spin yarn acceptably with practice, freeing up your adult hands to do things like the weaving, while you really can’t bring your tots into your leather working and expect them to do anything but get underfoot. And shitty cloth smells way better than shitty rotting leather. And none of this even scratches the surface of the material property reasons why a society may prefer leather for some applications (saddles, shoes...) and cloth for others.

jackironsides

Addendum to the leather reblog above, but salt is also historically very expensive, and pretty crucial to most of the older European methods of hide treatment I was able to find when reading up on tanning a few months ago. I can't remember if you still need it if you're using alum, but alum is still something you're going to have to buy in order to process your skins. (From what I read, tanning with brains was an Indigenous American technique, which was rapidly adopted by the colonisers bc of its efficient use of resources that are easy to hand, but modern American sources tend to drown out everything else when looking at historical stuff online without institution access, so I wouldn't state that categorically.)

The original thread is why I cringe every time I read a fic in my home fandom – which is roughly Fantasy Medieval/Renaissance in technology – that has main characters tear each other's clothing to show how excited they are for boning down.

In a premodern context, if someone tore my clothing carelessly, let alone deliberately, we're not fucking. We're no longer on speaking terms. They're dead to me. A shirt is bad enough; at least those were comparatively disposable, and could probably be repaired in a way that's unnoticeable when you wear it (shirts in most premodern European societies are underwear, not outerwear), but a doublet? Fuck right off into the sun.

‘Ooh, you can tell how ~horny~ I am for you because I crashed your car in order to get into your pants.’ That's what you sound like. Tear your own fucking shirt if you're that keen.

It's such an incredibly modern trope to me. I could MAYBE understand it if it's supposed to be a flex on how wealthy someone is, but my poor as shit blorbo with his hand-to-mouth existence who owns three shirts MAXIMUM should not be doing this. Would not be doing this.

The earliest I could see that trope as plausible in my mind is the Victorian period. There was still a healthy second-hand market for clothing, but clothing production had become far more mechanised than it ever had been before, and tearing a shirt probably wouldn't send you to the poor house. (But please still don't tear a suit jacket or a woman's bodice. That's hours of sewing work alone, even after the advent of treadle sewing machines. What's wrong with you.)

bone-cement-huffer

memeception

hashtagloveloses

WE’VE HIT TERMINAL MEME

bl00dlikeice

@caesarianconfection

fidefortitude-deactivated202011

I’ve said “I hate this” so many times on this website, and never actually meant it, because “I hate this” is just shorthand for ‘this is an example of a meme given a twist I wasn’t expecting with intent to surprise’. Which is, in of itself, a meme on this site. God damn it.

But this… This is something else.

The rapidity of a meme’s introduction to its zenith to its decline is so rapid that in ten years, you’ll need a damn twenty-page manual to explain this. It’ll be as unfunny and hard to explain as jokes in Shakespeare plays, except even more inexplicable because fuck, at least Shakespeare’s jokes are usually about anal or fucking your mother, good wholesome sex jokes we can all get behind.

For the love of fuck, how do you explain loss.jpg? How do you explain gun?

mommacomms

….I THOUGHT THIS WAS A YMCA REFERENCE

pagesofkenna

it is a YMCA reference - that’s one of the 6 memes being represented here

ok let me see if i can break this down easily. YMCA is the easiest place to start - the song itself has become a meme over time with people changing the lyrics to reference other pop cultural events. so YMCA is meme one (1)

this first lyric replacement (”take the breadsticks and run”) is a reference to the tumblr meme ‘stuffing breadsticks into my purse’. i think everyone remembers that one so i wont bother to explain it. that’s meme two (2)

“man door hand hook car door” is a meme of its own, a creepypasta from i dont remember when. it was a terrible stupid retelling of the generic ‘stuck in a car while hook handed man tries to kill us’ story so the stupid title caught on for memorability. that in and of itself is meme three (3)

‘gun’ is… yeah i dont know how to explain gun. long story short you add gun to the end of a phrase instead of what you expect the last word to be. its shock funny. its everywhere but its popular to add to “man door hand hook car door” for.. some reason? gun is meme four (4)

and the thing is, this four meme combo is something thats gone around before. meme combos are, itself, a meme. which means taking this meme combo and mixing in another meme actually becomes meme five (5)

which leaves us at loss.jpg. loss.jpg was a terrible bad comic supposed to be about some tragic event, but it was presented so poorly literally no one takes it seriously, and for some reason recreating the four-panel setup has become popular. so thats meme six (6)

(but i need to add that this is the greatest version of loss.jpg i think i’ve ever seen. the initial ‘young man’ lines up with the guy bursting through the door, and the shock meme ‘gun’ matches the shock scene of the woman in the hospital and idk if OP even thought about that but it makes this just so much better)

animatedamerican

I wasn’t going to reblog this, but @pagesofkenna‘s comprehensive meme-by-meme annotation is a thing of beauty and should be shared.

captainlordauditor

average tumblr post contains one meme, this post, which contains six, is an outlier and should not be counted

japhers

it might also just be a coincidence due to loss.jpg’s format but the whole white minimalist four-panel setup is also suspiciously reminiscent of those early 2000’s rage comics

maps-and-elvis-and-zelda-n-shit

I was getting a political compass vibe too

your-uncle-dave

tag urself im man door hand hook car gun

politicalcompassmemes

This works better than I thought it would.

chiribomb-deactivated20220820

This was in my senior project

kait-the-kitty

I’m not sorry.

panickedmartian

EIGHT MEME COMBO

smooththegoofyshark

FATALITY

soda-soda-pop-deactivated202005

We have officially created a new language

soda-soda-pop-deactivated202005

I just had to do it to em

phoneykin

THIS FUCKING THREAD I’M GONNA CRY

I LOST IT AND MAN DOOR HAND HOOK CAR GUN AND DIDN’T EXPECT MORE I’M SOBBING

soda-soda-pop-deactivated202005

M E M E T E N

soda-soda-pop-deactivated202005

OwO?

W o w

You know I had to

I hope you know this is the most cursed addition to my post, and I love it

joyriding-in-the-fandoms

THIRTEEN!?

junepop45

SOMEONE EDIT THIS FROM THE ORIGINAL PHOTO SAYING “this one does not spark joy” TO THIS VERSION SAYING “this one sparks joy”

astral-ghoul-deactivated2025100

moved-to-ancient-gaylienz

well i added my contribution : )

why—

fandersunite

IM SCREAMING

robynspreciousnest

This is the most elaborate meme I have ever seen and damn am I concerned by how it makes sense.

operahousebookworm

“You’re in your 30s, but you still understand all this meme stuff?” “Oh yeah, sure.” “Can you explain it to me?” “I absolutely fucking cannot.”

sword-and-nightingale

One does not simply explain this

sword-and-nightingale

Edit:

Another freaking layer!!!

shitposting-hobbits-to-gallifrey

16 motherfucking layers

catbxy

In the future someone’s going to ask me to explain this and I’m going to be at a loss.jpg for words

three-cheers-for-pretty-odd

(my response to @biggest-goldiest-spoon & @shitposting-hobbits-to-gallifrey )

sword-and-nightingale

Yo, I added more layers.

24 layers!

theman-themyth-themoth

Oh my fucking god-

sword-and-nightingale

It took longer to do this than I’m willing to admit.

blaizeofglory

I’m sorry-

ilovetomotoes3000

What the fuck? It got longer?

ricecakeandhoney

My terrible contribution

adulthoodisokay

every time i see this post it has more additions. bless.

phoenixofthestars

@hellsite-hall-of-fame

catasters

drtanner

Teaching the baby ADVANCED TECHNIQUES

notsoheadless

leggyboyjohnson

let's get fucking WRECKED by mama

naamahdarling

ellipsus-writes

Just in time for Valentine’s Day... 💔

Ready to break up with Google?

So are we!

We’ve rounded up a bunch of privacy-centric alternatives for everything Google.

Check out the full list over on the blog!

- The Ellipsus Team xo

getvalentined

Fun fact, on top of being staunchly against genAI, ellipsus literally has an Export To AO3 button. I do the majority of my writing in LibreOffice, but I've been moving all my GDocs over to ellipsus for a bit and I really love the interface. If you're looking for an alternative to GDocs, this is The One.

gamesoft

octolinggrimm-deactivated202409

I am CRYING with laughter

thisisctrying

Gosh I hate grind culture. My little sister just started medical school and all of her orientation leaders are like “you absolutely cannot have a life WHATsoever you WILL have to give up EVERYTHING besides this program say GOODBYE to your hobbies and relationships” and now she’s calling me feeling guilty for running and going to the grocery store and that’s just WRONG! And that is exactly what I was told starting law school as well, and rejecting that mentality was the best thing I ever did but it was so hard not to buy into. Anyway if any of you are in an intense academic program PLEASE take time to sleep and eat and exercise and maintain your relationships and keep up your hobbies! you are not a robot who exists solely to study and I promise that living a life and staying physically and mentally healthy is not going to make you fail

carnivorousnymph

Workaholism is not just a “millennial quirk”, it’s a very real psychological problem that should not be normalized and praised. Diligence and self-realization? Awesome!!! Working so much you forget to eat, sleep and socialize? Not okay under any circumstances.

mod2amaryllis

luulapants

25 ways to be a little more punk in 2025

Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality

Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway

Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups

Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay

Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward

Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient

Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative

Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!

Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community

DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!

Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?

Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.

Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability

Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough

Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing

Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work

Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market

Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question

Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them

Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area

Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...

Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable

Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact

Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive

Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people

queer-as-city-folk

I mostly talk about transit and local politics but seriously do as much of this as you can, it really does help

vanilla-bean-buttercream

On my hands and knees begging adults to allow children to engage in risk play.

And by risk play I don't mean handing them a gun and playing Russian Roulette.

I mean like climbing trees, getting so sick spinning on the swing they throw up, balancing on the curb, sitting in the mud, walking on slippery surfaces, building half ass ramps to ride their bike over, standing on rocks, or anything that involves a smidgen of confidence and out of the box thinking that could result in injury.

Obviously like watch your kids and such, but when we talk about the fun of being an 80s or 90s kid, it's not just talking about CDs and Walkmans or not having iPads. It's about how kids today were robbed of critical learning and experience skills we were allowed to have.

Playgrounds disappearing, helicopter parents, and sue culture really destroyed a child's development in the United States, and I think it's about time we as adults recognize that, because the kids sure have.

just7frogsinapeoplesuit

You know what happens to kids who don't get to take reasonable risks? They never learn how to gauge safety or control their bodies in risky situations.

A kid who never climbs a tree becomes an adult who falls off a ladder because they don't intuitively know to keep 3 points of contact when climbing.

A kid who never skins their knees launching off a swingset becomes an adult who shatters an arm because they never learned how to break a fall.

Kids who are allowed to take risks become safer adults.

just7frogsinapeoplesuit

This crossed my dash again, so here's a more thorough list of things risk play is necessary for:

- Developing pain tolerance & an understanding of which types/intensities of pain are "okay" and which need immediate medical attention

- Calibrating the inner ear (sense of balance) and learning how the body reacts to experiencing different things, essential to learning to control the body in unexpected situations

- Developing reflexes and subconscious safety instincts (e.g. protectively throwing up your hands when an object flies toward your face)

- Normalizing getting hurt so the first reaction to an injury is just to treat it (and not to have a fearful emotional meltdown)

- Learning how to treat and heal from injuries (beginnings of self-care)

- Developing appropriate levels of fear around various activities, desensitizing fear around doing harmless things and establishing a fear response for actions that caused an injury. This is key to properly gauging risk in new situations.

Additionally, the reason it's so essential to mess around and get hurt as a kid is not just because it's a critical developmental stage, but also because kids' bodies are growing and naturally resistant to major injuries. A 3rd grader can get launched off a bike onto the pavement and only sustain a few scrapes and bruises that will heal in a few days, while someone who's 30 would likely pull or sprain something (or worse) and take weeks to heal.

If you are someone who grew up not being allowed to take risks it is likely you have a low pain tolerance, fear surrounding physical activities, slow reflexes, and poor judgment. The good thing is that it's never too late to learn! Our brains are very malleable, so if you missed out on this stuff as a kid now is the time to go climb a tree, go on a hike with unstable footing, or join a casual sports team. Just start small and work your way up, since your body won't be as resilient as it was when you were 9 :)

vanilla-bean-buttercream

Your additions have tickled my brain in the right way. Thank you for your contribution to the discussion!

beyondthisdarkhouse

This is also why I think kids should (WITH APPROPRIATE SUPERVISION AND SAFEGUARDS) be allowed to play with knives, fire, and power tools.

They let you play with some of the fundamental experiences in life: to create, to alter, to destroy. They also give you an appropriate sense of what you're capable of, and what's possible to do. In grad school I met people who'd never even changed a lightbulb before, who found it empowering to learn how to use a screwdriver and change the batteries in a basic electronic. Being able to take out the U-bend in a sink to retrieve a dropped earring? WHOOOAAAAA.

But kids can learn a lot about what the comfortable limits of their abilities are, and also figuring out from direct experience or vivid example what the uncomfortable limits of their abilities are (ranging from "You can push a stick into the fire. You cannot take a stick OUT of the fire" to "We can turn the circuit breaker off and replace this electrical outlet, but we are NOT ELECTRICIANS, so we use a certified store-bought outlet instead of wiring our own from scraps. Let me show you a Youtube video about how electrical fires happen.")

It builds self-esteem and self-efficacy, and a sense of mastery over some small part of the world. It teaches that challenges can be faced and problems can be solved, and how to look for sources of good information to solve them with.

htsan

EMERGENCY COMMISSIONS

Tldr: I am getting kicked out of the country I have been living in for 5 yrs 💀

Detailed + refined style:

More information/OG post >here<

My Kofi

If you cannot support, a reblog is appreciated! Thank you!

__________________

- ... What happened? -

Well, I've been dealing with a lot of things and... beaurocracy.

Let's say that the fascist-- I mean-- totally not-a-fascist-right-wing party from the US made the situation worse. Me and a friend of mine was denied to extend our stay in this country, because they have too many refugees coming in and we have to leave. (Luckily my friend got another job in another country, however.. I was not so lucky)

If anyone is willing to support my art and labor it will help a lot with this!!

If no one believes my situation you can ask for @ghostangel2000 or @fudgelling-away for confirmation that I am not lying.

I am very priviliged that I can ask for your help and support. That I can at least give you all something back with my art.

Please be patient as well.. It is a tough time in my life. I will finish it eventually. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for being the coolest community in tumblr.

stuck-in-hawkins

You know what’s some crazy $hit?

This fabulous bitch

She makes a shit ton of poses (like 16,000 or some crazy nonsense). I used this lovely lady to draw so much as a teen. Whether it was some nerdy pose for my Mary Sue as fuck OCs

or for full on fight sequences

or for tragic deaths of my OCs in the arms of a totally OOC main protagonist.

this bitch hooked me up.

And with the wildest, craziest stuff that you could see in your head but had no way or resources to reasonably draw like

or this

DUDE! INASNE SHIT!! So I was using her for a pose reference and decided, you know what, I owe this bitch some cash. Lemme dole it out for her. BUT then, I looked and saw she only has 286 fucking patrons!! This chick gives out free shit and spends countless hours arranging these shoots and setting this stuff up.

I’ll fork up the cash, SenshiStock. You’re worth it.

Check out this amazing woman’s stuff, and get knowledged: https://www.deviantart.com/senshistock

brainmuncher

I have been following her for years on deviantart.

Highly reccomend checking her out. She’s the best. If I had any money to throw I’d throw it at her for providing such a big help in my life.

sanders-sides-uncorrect-quotes

This hero doesn’t wear capes, she instead wears (and looks utterly flawless) in tank tops(?)

anstarwar

Interrupting my regular Star Wars BS to reblog this because @senshistock is amazing and beyond worth the follow and support! I first started using her refs gosh I want to say back in maybe 2008, and I’m happy to be a supporter of her over on Patreon. If you’re an artist please go find her stuff on all the platforms, you will not regret it!

cacodaemonia

Yessss, she is so awesome! Been following her for years. My favorite stock artist is jademacalla, who is, incidentally, in the last two images above. He has a lot of great angles, costumes, gear, etc! I love his hands, too.

steppingonshatteredglass-deacti

rb to save an artists life

thatdisasterauthor

Just so everyone knows, she recently stopped using the name SenshiStock and switched to AdorkaStock! All her links and socials have switched to that. Also she has a TikTok of her doing the poses live, which is stupid useful because you can pause it at any point in the pose for just the right reference.

brain-w0rmz

im-jesus

yes, hi, it's me. i am the faggot.

sans-by-shipper

I fucking knew it.

capsuleinthesediment

over-sleep

여어- 히싸씨부리 （ ɔ̸ᴉʇɐ͟N͞さんのツイート）

princesstigerbelle

“NAFTER NOON!”

whitebear-ofthe-watertribe

Every. Time. Every single time. I always get so delighted by this picture set. And I always forget what it’s followed up by. And then I see the “NAFTER NOON!” and absolutely lose it. I’m so glad this post exists.

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