i am not taking questions at this time
DEAR READER
occasionally subtle
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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Mike Driver
wallacepolsom

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Xuebing Du
$LAYYYTER

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cherry valley forever

JBB: An Artblog!
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titsay
Show & Tell
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Peter Solarz
I'd rather be in outer space šø
todays bird

Janaina Medeiros
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@comtesse-de-laval
i am not taking questions at this time
Rei Kamoi (1928 -1985)
Crossings by Walter de la Mare, 1923, Dorothy Lathrop
https://www.wikiart.org/en/dorothy-lathrop/crossings-by-walter-de-la-mare-1923
some things that help me avoid picking:
putting a non-comedogenicĀ oil or thick moisturizer on so your fingers literally slip off if you try
wearing gloves so even if you touch your skin, you canāt feel texture as much and canāt really squeeze
using a face mask that can be left on for a long time, cause they help your skin and hide bumps/redness/spots AND remind you not to touch
similar, but try those little stickers that you put on spots, cause they stay on super well, help encourage healing if thereās actually a spot there, and make it harder to pick
set a timer when youāre going to the bathroom/going to be near a mirror, so that it can go off and interrupt you if you start to pick
put post-it notes on your mirrors reminding you not to pick
reward yourself or just celebrate every time you donāt pick or pick less
if youāre competitive, try keeping a tally of how long you can go without picking and keep trying to beat your record
get rid of any magnifying mirrors you have
same for any blackhead extractors or tools you use to pick, even if that includes tweezers or things with other purposes
credit to my psychologist for this one: remind yourself that picking may or (more likely) may not help the spot, but it will DEFINITELY feed your dermatillomania
donāt be afraid to reassess techniques if they stop helping you! sometimes taking pictures of my skin helps remind me that picking makes my skin worse and keeps me accountable, sometimes it just makes me obsess more over my skinĀ
not my quote, but someone wrote that if you stumble going down a flight of stairs you donāt give up and throw yourself down the rest of the way, you stop yourself, regain balance, and keep going. same thing applies with picking; if you do pick, donāt tell yourselfĀ āfuck it, might as well keep going since i already messed upā
me, starting a new game: iām gonna be evil this time
me,Ā 5 minutes into said game: Being Mean Is Not Nice
me, after failing to be evil: iām gonna look up the youtube videos of that playthrough instead
me, looking at the videos: i canāt watch this
Old!
Bukbot, did the Great Egg! Your needs are met.
Reblog to have your needs be met by the Great Egg
Your needs are met.
pale rider
Worldās Oldest Wild Bird Returns to Midway!
Wisdom and her egg on Midway Atoll in 2018. Photo creditĀ Madalyn Riley /USFWS
Wisdom, a Laysan albatross and worldās oldest known, banded bird in the wild has returned to Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge and Battle of Midway National Memorial!Ā
She first appeared back at her traditional nest site on November 29 and biologists on Midway have confirmed that she has laid an egg.Ā Wisdom was first banded as an adultĀ in 1956, and although she is at least 68 years old, she is still laying eggs and raising chicks.
Wisdom and her mate Akeakamai return to the same nest site on Midway Atoll each year. Albatross often take time off to rest between egg-laying years, but the pair have met on Midway to lay and hatch an egg every year since 2006.Ā
Keep reading
š Welcome back, Wisdom! š
The Pulp Scifi That Inspired the X-Men
I wrote before about the sources of inspiration behind King Kong and Conan the Barbarian, as both of these were so far back in time the things that inspired them are not really read much.
With the X-Men, itās important to remember that a subgenre of science fiction once existed about mutants who we identified with because they were persecuted and feared by normal humans, which allowed authors to use science fiction to explore the idea of alienation. X-Men is a part of this trend, and seems unique because itās the only one from this long-standing trend that is actively discussed today. Really, this is a kind of story all people who feel gifted or alienated are compelled to create.
Slan by A.E. van Vogt
Slan is a story about Jommy Cross, a young boy who watches his parents die in front of him in the first chapter, hunted by the government because they are a telepathic, superintelligent and superstrong subrace of humans with antenna on their heads known as Slans. Slans are hunted to extinction by the corrupt government ruled by the world dictator, Kier Gray. Jommy has to go into hiding, wearing a hat to hide his tendrils.
Itās a good bet that if you think about other planets a lot, itās because you think this one is somehow a painful and unsuitable place to be for you. Slan is an extraordinarily well written novel that is still intriguing and mysterious even today, it always tops my list of recommendations when people ask me about pulp scifi because it absolutely holds up. What makes it so important is that scifi fandom responded with an unusually strong sense of identification. The circumstances and history of the Slan are not exactly like that of outsiders who are ostracized and ādifferent,ā but we relate to emotions, not specific life details. A lot of people who were homosexual, whoās parents are drunks and like to beat them, who were sexually abused, or extremely poor and alienated from richer peers, or just āon the outside looking inā can relate to the Slans. Scifi fans, whoās culture was incredibly fringe, called themselves āSlansā for years in fanzines an fan communications.
Itās no exaggeration to say that for the 1940s to the 1950s, Slan was the most beloved and widely read and influential science fiction novel, and maybe one of the best, too.
Ā Mutant (aka the āBaldiesā stories) by Henry Kuttner
Maybe one of the best of scifiās forgotten geniuses of the 1940s, Henry Kuttnerās Baldies books are actually a post-atomic story, about a community of telepathic mutants known as ābaldiesā who hide away from a human race that fears and hates them. All Baldies were linked in a telepathic uni-mind, so none of them were ever alone. The narrator is the last surviving member of his species; the enemy is the prejudice and paranoia of the self-destructive human race.
Children of the Atom by Wilmar H. Shiras
The idea of a school as a setting where mutant children can get refuge and hide from a prejudiced world that doesnāt understand them comes from this book.Ā
In this one, due to atomic radiation, a sub-race of superintelligent humans emerges. They donāt have any mental powers except their superintelligence. The Children of the Atom take refuge in a school whoās true purpose is unknown. In the finale of the book, a human preacher leads a mob to the door of their school, which makes the Children realize they canāt isolate themselves from the rest of mankind.
Ā Odd John by Olaf Stapledon
Olaf Stapledon used to be a big deal. He inspired Asimov, C.S. Lewis, and Heinlein with his extraordinary āLast and First Men,ā a story set over a billion years about the entire sweep of human history. But one of his more interesting novels was āOdd John,ā a novel about the first āevil mutant.ā Odd John is a charismatic and sometimes truly creepy antihero, an unusual mutant born ahead of his time; he switches between sympathetic and monstrous. We see his brutal mistreatment at the hands of the human race, but then see him use his powers on women in eerie ways, and see the hardened person he became, who created an island kingdom and base separate from the rest of the human race, a move that the evil mutants in Marvel, in imitation of Odd John, often did several times.
A lot of people identify the evil mutants with militant black leftists, but in the actual comics themselves, their worldview had way less to do with Marx and Malcolm X (as with āDune is about oil,ā that a giveaway someone hasnāt read it and just knows about it), and way more to do with some combination of Nietzsche and Captain Nemo. Like Nietzsche, their worldview is that traditional human morality doesnāt apply to them as another species. Each evil mutant is Nietzscheās conception of the superman, elevated beyond good and evil and a āsovereign citizenā laws canāt govern. Nietchean āwill to powerā thinking is found in every single speech by Magneto. Likewise, like Captain Nemo, they are often driven by an urge for solitude in places they canāt be commanded by the small mindedness and petty tyranny of humans. Odd John combined both of these together: he was a Nietzchean superman who had a cruel disdain for ordinary morality, whoās strongest desire was to be left alone.
He That Hath Wings by Edmond Hamilton
Ā The Angel has a very specific point of origin: a wonderful and tragic story about a mutant born with wings by āPlanet Smasherā Edmond Hamilton, who was always fascinated by notions of mutation and human evolution; he invented the story about the āguy who invents an evolution ray.ā
The titular mutant is a man born with wings, who, when he falls in love, cuts them off to blend in with the normal human race. He loves his wife so much he gave up flight for her, but unexpectedly, his wings grow back at the end. He knows he has to get rid of them to blend into society, but he is allowed one last night of flight.Ā
Gladiator by Philip Wylie
Fans of Superman probably know this novel as one of the major inspirations for the creation of Superman (possibly THE major inspiration), with Hugo Danner, an artificially created mutant who is superstrong, invulnerable, and able to āleap tall buildings in a single bound.ā
Iād compare Philip Wylie to Michael Crichton: he was the one ābestsellerā scifi novelist at a time when scifi was ghettoized. His work was regularly on the best seller list, including āWhen Worlds Collide,ā a novel that created the ādisasterā genre as we know it today, and is still influential through itās film adaptation.
Philip Wylieās Gladiator didnāt just create Superman. The angst and anger over being in a world you never made was right there from the beginning. Hugo Danner was a misanthrope whoās attempts to help were stopped by a senseless and incomprehending mankind that feared and hated him. Like Slan, this is yet another novel from the past that is surprisingly readable and good today.
Ā The Humanoids by Jack Williamson
This is where the Sentinels came from.
To be clear: Jack Williamson did not invent the idea of robots who turn on the human race. But the very specific kind of robot the Sentinels are comes from the Humanoids, a novel about robots that take the instruction to protect mankind incredibly literally to the point they become dictators and ruthlessly command us, and battles consist of them adapting instantly to whatever strategies the human race uses.
Malleus Maleficarum by Jacobus Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer The Hammer of Witches Translated by Montague Summers and edited with an introduction by Pennethorne Hughes London Folio Society 1968 [First Edition thus]
Executive dysfunction gothic
- You have to shower. You cannot shower. You are standing right in front of the shower. You want to shower. You cannot shower.
- The meeting begins. āDid everyone see the email?ā There is a chorus of nodding heads. You nod, too. You think you may possibly have checked an email account before, on one single occasion, at some unknown time, probably in a past life.
- You are hungry. You have been hungry for three days now. The hunger has not spontaneously resolved itself. How inconvenient, you think. How rude.
- You depend on your planner/calendar. You loathe your planner/calendar. You canāt function without it. You live in constant fear of it. Itās an unhealthy relationship. You think you both should start seeing other people.
- There is a pile on your floor. It is a treasure trove, the Room of Requirement. It has everything. You look for something specific. It has nothing. There was never any pile.
- Thereās been a change of plans, they say. You donāt understand. They repeat: āthereās been a change of plans.ā You donāt understand. The mere suggestion causes a buzzing in your head that drowns out everything else. You donāt understand.
- Youāre in class and you donāt understand the lecture. You look back at your past notes. You look at a calendar. You have not been to class in two weeks. You have no memory of this supposed time. Where did it go? Why did it leave?
- āOrganizational tips for success: Keep a planner! Write it down! Stick to a schedule! Make a list!ā You are torn between deranged laughter and ugly crying. You choose both.
And how would you define attraction? Do you see a discrepancy between finding someone beautiful and perceiving them as attractive? I know I do.
Attraction is energy, anon, and itās powerful and itās unexplainable and itās domineering and I absolutely agree with you ā quite often it has to very little with beauty in the classical sense of beauty. Itās conflicting and itās puzzling and it touches upon paradox and chaos and itās truly something undefinable because it does not exactly need a definition. Attraction Iād say is intense and itās flowing and itās never static and itās a shared thing. It might not be a mutual thing but itās a shared thing. Itās pulsating energy and absolution and it involves something of theĀ āhelplessā for me.
#negative capability
My tag #negative capability indicates a kind of credo or core value, one that I continue to articulate and rearticulate on an ongoing basis, but essentially itās about a kind of fundamental epistemic openness. Ur-selections follow.
Keats:
It struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously ā I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reasonā¦
Rilke:
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Donāt search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Aristotle:
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Russell:
Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.Ā
Jung:
Raise your hand up to the darkness above you, pray, despair, wring your hands, kneel, press your forehead into the dust, cry out, but do not name Him, do not look at Him. Leave Him without name and form. What should form the formless? Name the nameless? Step onto the great way and grasp what is nearest. Do not look out, do not want, but lift up your hands. The gifts of darkness are full of riddles. The way is open to whomever can continue in spite of riddles. Submit to the riddles and the thoroughly incomprehensible. There are dizzying bridges over the eternally deep abyss. But follow the riddles.
David Chapman on the fluid mode
Penitent St. Mary Magdalene, Titian
Medium: oil,canvas
https://www.wikiart.org/en/titian/penitent-st-mary-magdalene
some things only she knows.