Crimson Square @crimsonsquare - Tumblr Blog

#aggressivelyarospec #fanfic #gen and aro prompts

Here’s the link:

https://archiveofourown.org/collections/GenAndAroPrompts/profile

aroloverboy

Let’s talk about the fabulous aromantics out there

#aro #aromantic

asafo2020-deactivated20171024

http://m.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/03/1408341/-Psychologist-openly-admits-he-trains-police-officers-to-shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later S-I-G-N-A-L B-O-O-S-T

blackkidzen

No. YOU DON’T GET TO DO THIS AND SLIP UNDER THE RADAR. Anyone who’s seeing this, I beg you to reblog. I want as many people to see this shit as possible.

shortheaux-deactivated20161030

this is really true tho!!! my uncle was a cop in NY & FL and they taught him to shoot first if he had to. anytime a cop feels threatened (and they basically teach cops they’re always threatened) they can shoot. its rlly sick psychological torture shit to help create a police state tbh

cosmic-noir

W H A T

pensivelyplayfulme

Here’s a source from NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/us/training-officers-to-shoot-first-and-he-will-answer-questions-later.html

pensivelyplayfulme

Also! Click here to contact his organization and remind him of the blood on his hands. These are his murders too, and everyone involved deserves to feel the weight of guilt.

#this is really disturbing?#wtf #cops #police violence

Hey y’all what if I told you that there’s a fiction novel out there where a 6 square mile hunk of West Virginia, including a small mining town, is accidentally transported to 1632 Germany due to a cosmic accident.

And the local mining union looks around, goes ‘well shit, guess it’s time to organize everything’ and proceeds to deal with all the incredible bullshit that comes with being dropped into the middle of the 30 years war.

What if I told you it’s free to read online

https://www.baen.com/readonline/index/read/sku/0671578499

“OK but have you considered; fuck all your kings and shit. Toss them the fuck out and rule yourselves.”-United Mine Workers in an alternate timeline

“No but do go on.” German peasants in said alternate timeline

“Fuck.” - every royal in Europse

“Why do you so scandalously show your legs?”- a woman from 1632

“You ain’t never been in West Virginia in the summer, have you honey.” - a couple of blue collar working class girls from the late 20th century

specsthespectraldragon

by the same author, TIME SPIKE, where Hernando De Soto gets beaten to death by Native Americans and then fed to dinosaurs, and also the source of my gay awakening.

You had me at “De Soto gets beaten to death by Native Americans and fed to dinosaurs”

benevolentwanderer

holy shit people don’t know about the 1632 series? By the way, there are several dozen short story collections (the “grantville gazette”), all fantastic, not to mention the novel-length entries? GO WILD, EVERYONE, there’s so much Great Stuff in there I can’t even decide what to highlight.

roach-works

if you like competence porn, women being extremely cool, and people who actually give a fuck about functional governments, the 1632 series is absolutely going to be your jam.

Huh, some content warnings:

* It’s very much “everyone gets a (heterosexual) romantic relationship”

* There is a lot of rape mention in the first book, and it’s something that has happened in the backstory of more than one character, and something that nearly happens to another; it’s not shown on page though.

* It sometimes gets very, very obvious that most authors contributing are cishet white guys.

That said, there’s a shit ton of awesome bits that have mostly been mentioned by everyone else - like it being blue-collar workers who get to be center-stage as the good guys, the fact that who gets to vote is a major issue, and Gretchen Richter -

And now I wanna go re-read the first book again because Gretchen Richter.

#1632

@trustmeimageographer reblogged your post and added:

Hi I’m a fantasy writer and now I need to know what potatoes do to a society

They drastically increase peasant food security and social autonomy.

The main staple of medieval agriculture was grain–wheat, barley, oats, or rye. All that grain has to be harvested in a relatively short window, about a week or two. It has to be cut down (scythed), and stored in the field in a safe and effective way (stooked); then it has to be brought to a barn and vigorously beaten (threshed) to separate the grain from the stalks and the seed husks. It can be stored for a few weeks or months in this form before it spoils or loses nutritional value.

Then it has to be ground into flour. In the earlier middle ages, peasants could grind their own flour by hand using small querns, but landlords had realized that if they wanted to get more money out of their peasants, it was more effective for the entire village to have one large mill that everyone used. Peasants had to pay a fee to have their flour ground–and it might say something that there are practically no depictions of millers in medieval English literature in which the miller is not a corrupt thief.

Then the flour has to be processed to make most of its nutrients edible to humans, which ideally involves yeast–either it’s made into bread which takes hours to make every time (and often involves paying to use the village’s communal bread oven) and spoils within a few days, or it’s made into weak ale, which takes several weeks to make, but can keep for several months.

Potatoes, in comparison…

Potatoes have considerably more nutrients and calories than any similar crop available in medieval Europe–they beat turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, or anything else all to heck. I don’t know if they beat wheat out for calories per acre, but practically…

When you dig a potato out of the ground (which you can do at any time within a span of several months), you can bury it in the ashes of a fire for an hour, or you can boil it in water for 20 minutes.

Then you eat it. Boom. Done. (I mean, if you’re not fussy, you could even eat them raw.)

You store the ones you don’t want right now in a root cellar and plant some of them in the spring to get between a fivefold and tenfold return on your crop.

Potatoes don’t just feed you–they free you. Grain-based agriculture relies on lots of people working together to get the work done in a very short length of time. It relies on common infrastructure that is outside the individual peasant’s control. The grain has to be brought to several different locations to be processed, and it can be seized or taxed at any of those points. It’s very open to exploitation.

TW: Genocide The Irish Potato Famine happened because the English colonizers of Ireland demanded rents and taxes that were paid in grain, and it ended up that you didn’t really get to keep much of the grain you grew. So the Irish farmed wheat in fields to pay the English, and then went home and ate potatoes from their gardens. And then, because they were eating only one specific breed of potatoes, a blight came through and wiped all their potatoes out, and then they starved. So English narratives about the potato famine tended to say “Oh yes, potato blight, very tragic,” and ignore the whole “The English were taking all the grain” aspect, but the subtext here is: Potatoes are much harder to tax or steal than grain.

So… yeah. I realize it’s very counterproductive to explain to everybody why I’m always like “OMG POTATO NO” when I wish I could just chill out and not care about this. But the social implications of the humble potato are rather dramatic.

touchmycoat

#very cool! #reference #this is why taxes on china were collected in rice too #for the same grain reasons #bc the peasants just ate yams which were quick and easy to grow #but rice is backbreaking excruciating work that keeps the peasant population under control #and requires a collectivity and organization that the bureaucratic state can provide #ESPECIALLY since you need irrigation for rice even more than you do for wheat and stuff #and irrigation planning and upkeep is a huge part of a local bureaucratic official’s duties in ancient china #i had no idea about the miller stuff in medieval times that’s very fascinating #there’s a lot to be said for how monks were healthier #bc they got to grow vegetables #and they were allowed economic autonomy as a result #but there’s another essay for that (x)

akhmenos

I’m a little curious tho, how does just seeds from the grain go bad?

Like if they lose their nutritional value so quickly how do they get planted the next year?

Part of how medieval farmers avoided the problem of grain spoilage over the winter was to plant their grain crop in the late autumn, and let it start growing over the winter. Then they’d sow again in early spring. The winter crop might get blighted by the cold, or it might come up early; the spring crop might not sprout as much and would take longer, but it might help you out if your winter crop failed. They were kind of hedging their bets in an imperfect system.

Faster causes of of grain spoilage are visibly “something has ruined this grain”–insects, molds, or vermin get in at the grain, so your grain is much more likely to be eaten, pooped on, or rotten when you take it out of storage.

If you can get grain to survive those quicker methods, eventually grain can spoil simply by being exposed to air. After a few months the oil inside it oxidizes, which destroys a lot of its nutrients. You might get it to sprout six months later, but it’s a lot less nutritious if you eat it, and if you grow it the plants will get less of a head start before they have to rely on their root system to bring in nutrients from the soil.

Very occasionally, archeologists turn up ancient seeds that still sprout, but those seeds are usually exceptionally well preserved–for example, sealed in a jar in a tomb that was undisturbed for thousands of years and magically it never got hot or wet enough to spoil. But you can’t store large amounts of grain like that, partly because the simple existence of large amounts of grain will attract pests that will spoil it. The ones that survive are the one-in-a-million cases.

blueelectricangels

My absolute favourite under-acknowledged agricultural hazard is self-heating and thermal runaways.

If a plant isn’t actively growing it is, in fact, decomposing - the speed at which it’s doing that depends on things like external temperature, moisture, etc and can be anywhere from very slow to very fast.

Stuff that is decomposing produces heat.

Grain is an amazing insulator, so all of that heat gets trapped in the middle of the bin.

High heat encourages more decomp. Which produces more heat. Which produces more decomp. Which, eventually, can lead to a thermal runaway, in which the grain passes its ignition point and begins to smolder. (And if you’re really unlucky, that can spark a dust explosion.)

This is one of the reasons that grain farmers are Very Concerned about moisture content - high moisture content means faster decomposition, and thus faster spoilage but also the risk of your grain bin blowing up. Modern farmers carefully control the moisture content and air circulation of their stored grain to maximize quality and shelf life, while avoiding inconvenient explosions.

I don’t know that medieval farmers ever would have produced enough grain to be at risk of thermal runaway - but there are hazards to storing large amounts of grain even aside from pests and loss of nutritional value.

#potatoes #interesting #I am now having the impulse of Very Deliberately including potatoes in a story - and including all the social structure differences...

I feel almost certain I’ve read of medieval city fires that started in moldy haylofts and silos.

theoppositeofadults

chemicalheart-deactivated202009

The term was literally *coined* by the media then absorbed into psychiatry later. I have a few readings on this lemme try to find the titles at least

Edit the website I use is being funny but I’d recommend The “ Short Step ” from Love to Hypnosis: A Reconsideration of the Stockholm Syndrome by Celia Jameson and this

Stockholm Syndrome isn’t just about dv, it’s about maintaining state power by pathologizing empathy with oppressed people

losingtranslation

Well fuck

#interesting #psychology #misogyny #Stockholm syndrome #or rather why Stockholm syndrome isn't a thing

phoenixyfriend

Okay so the first quiz couldn't handle 45 possible results so let's try this again with a more limited cast. (There is... one character from Act Two. But everyone else is from Act One.)

Enjoy!

#axel Higgs #???#description old. Fairly good liar. Very very loyal. In love for the first time despite being centuries old #I am aro #and usually among the youngest amongst my surroundings #I don't know about the other two

“I just want us to have a conversation about why people find problematic fic appealing!” says someone who will definitely shut that conversation down the MOMENT anyone says anything they disagree with.

“I just want you to think through the implications!” says the person who flips the fuck out the moment you bring scientific research on what the implications are to the table.

I’m so sick of people going “waaaaaaah we just want to have a conversaaaaaation” when they don’t want to have a conversation, they just want a bigger soapbox to shout their ideas and denounce all others from.

So much of my LIFE is seriously examining the effect narratives and art have on people but fucking nobody who says “well can’t we talk about how fiction affects reality” cares about what I have to say.

captainlordauditor

“I just think you should consider the implications,” says the person not considering the implications of their own words

“You are responsible for the consequences of your fiction,” says someone who absolutely does not care about the consequences of their real-life behaviour.

riptidemonzarc

You are free to stop reading, to stop watching, to stop listening. You’re free to stop the *instant* something makes you uncomfortable, or when you get bored, or when you get scared, or when you get turned on, or when you get seized by awkwardness so hard it makes you fold over and groan in pain, or just because you don’t feel like consuming a given piece of media any longer.

You are free, in short, to keep yourself from consuming anything at all, for any reason, You’re not free to keep other people from consuming their own media. You’re not free to save someone else from consuming media that upsets *them*, much less from media that upsets *you*.

It’s not rocket science.

fred-erick-frankenstein

⬆️

corvidkusnos

tbh I think you completely missed the point, lmao.

Both the writer and the consumer have to take responsibility.

Consumers need to take responsibility of the media they intake and not interact with things that have warnings for things they don’t like. That much is true.

But the writer also needs to take responsibility in their writing, too. Writing sensitive themes aren’t inherently bad, but how the writer portrays and uses those themes is what’s important, not just the mere existence of those themes in literature.

The entire argument is about whether those themes are romanticised/handled insensitively and how they have very real effects in real life. Writing sensitive themes isn’t inherently the writer condoning those themes, but you’d be surprised how many writers do condone those themes or take an unhealthy amount of joy in depicting those themes.

Literature isn’t suddenly exempt from all consequence when we hold every other form of media to a moral standard.

It’s not a call for censorship and no one’s allowed to explore dark themes in their writing, but a call for people who write those themes in an offensive way to take responsibility and deal with the consequences.

Content creators need to take responsibility for the content they produce just as much as the consumer needs to take responsibility for what they choose to consume. It’s not a one-sided thing. Fiction doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Please tell me

What are the appropriate consequences for artists who offensively depict sensitive themes? What appropriate consequences are visited on the creators of popular works that glamorize violence, like Joker, or eroticize sexual violence, like Game of Thrones?

What are the consequences of insensitive depiction? What provable harms come from fiction that insensitively depicts such things?

How do you tell which works are “romanticized” and “glamorized” and which are “sensitive” depictions? What are your criteria? Is it a test many different people could apply to a work of art and all come to the same conclusion on? Is it a test you could program a computer to apply?

If the focus is on how these themes are portrayed–that is, the approach each individual artist takes when portraying them–why are entire swathes of subject matter, like ships, condemned, and not the individual fanworks that take particular approaches to them?

Citing your sources would be appreciated.

doomhamster

“Oh but you don’t understand, we only want to make sure things are portrayed PROPERLY” says the person who has no standards for what “properly” is because we all know a Bad Exploitative Romanticizing Harmful Version when we see it, RIGHT?!

findingfeather

Also:

What effect on whether or not a portrayal is viewed as “sensitive” or “acceptable” vs “harmful” and “glamorized” will the identity and experiences of the creator have?

How will you determine this relationship?

How will you account for the harm of coercive disclosure and/or erasure of those unwilling to publicly disclose sensitive areas of their lives and experiences, or unable to do so without significant personal harm?

Do you think you would be able to determine who does and does not have the “right”, based on personal experience/ownership of events/identity/etc to create a particular portrayal without such disclosure? How will you be determining/testing this ability?

What does this determination do to the concept of “Death of the Author” and how it is applied to authorial intent vs results and outcomes?

How will you keep the concepts of “sensitive/appropriate” vs “romanticized/glamourized” from being used by those in social, cultural and/or political power to silence content that they do not like?

Have you researched how these concepts have been used to do exact that in the past? What cases can you give as examples? What measures will be taken in order to prevent the same thing from happening?

If you are relying on the difference between formal state sponsored censorship and mere social shunning/opprobrium, what research have you done into the effects of these forces on minority groups, particularly sexual and religious minority groups, and their artistic expressions? What measures will be taken to be certain that this case is different? How will those be implemented?

Citations still appreciated.

#fandom #I am tired #CN: CSA mention #I probably should not try to participate in this discussion #but I am a tired ND person with 0 impulse control #and also needed to figure out what I think

Someone asked questions and. I have issues not trying to answer questions. I also currently do not have functional impulse control bc I am tired. Okay, I never have functional impulse control.

So - uh. I am blundering along, mostly trying to organize my own thoughts. If I seem to overexplain stuff, that’s because of that.

There are tropes and depictions that are harmful - say, queer (1) characters dying off in fiction - Bury Your Gays.

As far as I know, most of the harm comes from the repetition of these tropes.

That said: Appropriate consequences for a content creator using one of these tropes would be… well, some mix of “people not consuming their content”, apologizing, promising to do better next time, and actually doing so unless we’re talking about… idk, say stuff that’s explicitely expousing Nazi ideology, in which case telling people they’re a Nazi is appropriate. And I’m not talking about “and if you view it through this one specific lense were Maybe these things are metaphors” or something like that. I’m talking about either “this is explicitely telling this” or “this metaphor couldn’t be more bloody obvious”

Also, a lot of tropes that often get labeled problematic for fanfic seem to be… fulfilling-fantasies-this-person-doesn’t-want-fulfilled-IRL-y? idk, going with something that squicks me out personally, a lot: Student/teacher fic. As far as I can tell, people tend to like the Forbidden Romance! angle and also often seem to put themselves in the student’s position of “ooh, Glamorous Older Hot Authority Figure!” (that said, if someone who enjoys this can correct me on this... correct me on this) I’m studying to be a teacher, put myself in the perspective of the teacher, consider professional ethics, and get ill at the thought of this. That does not make the existence of student/teacher fic wrong.

Part of the reason why the above is - well, something I don’t think of as problematic is because people, in general, whether reading or writing this, are very well aware this is wrong IRL, AFAIK. Stuff like - I’m aro, so I’m going to give aro examples: People very seldomly getting non-romantic happy endings can hurt, because it feels like I’m not capable of gaining one; people diminishing the importance of friendships in comparison to romantic relationships hurts because this happens IRL, too, is not seen as wrong, and dismisses the most important relationships in my life. Once again, these are mostly harmful not because of any single depiction(2), but because they’re normalized.

Fandom content creators are the wrong people to metaphorically-shout at for being insensitive in a lot of ways, but in easy reach, unfortunately. Not Ever Screwing Up when we’re all living in an awful system, inadvertently soaking up stuff that may be harmful if we pass it on bc we don’t know better, and doing all the research on your own on how to avoid that, maybe if you’re lucky with at most a handful of other people to spot for you, all of this in your spare time, unpaid, is really hard.

Fandom content creators also individually, on average, don’t reach as many people as, say, TV Show Writers. Those also get paid.

So - if we were living in a fairer world, the standards would be higher for people who get paid and reach a large audience, professionals, than for individual fandom content creators. Bc professionals get paid. Of course, then there should be a sliding scale there for “author trying not to drop below the poverty line” versus “movie with literal millions as a budget”; one of those has a much bigger potential research budget than the other.

Leaving awful messages in someone’s inbox generally doesn’t help anything at all, and will probably just harm people.

Moving in the direction of banning discussion and depiction of something in general is also wrong and will probably harm people. IIRC, and through second-hand knowledge... well, “ban all discussion of CSA” on livejournal apparently ended up shutting down survivor groups, which is explicitely and directly harming CSA survivors.

How the identity of content creators impacts stuff is Tricky, bc on the one hand it feels - different, to know something about someone like me was written by someone like me; but also forcing people to disclose bits of themselves they aren’t ready to disclose if they want to discuss them through fiction is wrong? And people in power silencing content they don’t like is. Very likely to happen even if you try to make the best possible standards to prevent this…

I probably forgot something. A lot of somethings. I am tired. Please do not act angry towards me.

(1) I’m not going to discuss me using this. I’m using queer. I’m queer.

(2) And I think leaving awful messages/shouting/etc at specific people for including these things in their content is mean and unproductive. They’re not doing it to hurt me and people like me, they probably don’t even know people like me can exist. That said, talking about How This Trope Can Harm is something I will do, and hope some of those who have written this do listen and - write sth that doesn’t do this next time they write something?

stet-archive-blog-deactivated20

writing Important Conversations

I want to share a bit of my methodology re: how to write about political talks/negotiations/machinations/court intrigue (hopefully) without boring your reader to death. I’m no Aaron Sorkin but writing drama that isn’t inherently “actiony” is definitely a learned skill.

step 1: background

You’ll find it’s much easier to work out the gist of your scene(s) if you figure out a few things before you start writing:

– what every person in the room wants, generally – what they want out of the specific interaction you’re writing – what they will actually get out of the interaction – why each character thinks this interaction is happening (may be different from why it is really happening) – the historical context; what led up to this moment, in the short and long term

Think of this like blocking a scene in theater. You need to know where everyone starts and where they need to end up before you figure out how they get there.

If you’re not sure about that last bullet point, that’s a sign you need to pause and do more research or more worldbuilding, as the case may be. There’s no need to get into gratuitous detail (unless you want to), but establishing a sense of continuity will make your story’s politics more believable and compelling, and it’s hard to do that if you yourself don’t know where your story’s events fall in history.

step 2: set the stage

People very rarely meet with the explicit intent of just talking to each other. (When someone says “we need to talk,” that’s sort of unusual and scary, right?) So, unless you’re setting up a meeting that both parties expect to be confrontational, you’ll want to make sure they’re physically doing something aside from talking.

This can be as simple as sharing a meal, but it’s also a great opportunity to sneak in some worldbuilding or exposition. In a court setting, for example, you could set an Important Conversation during a ceremony or other symbolic gathering. The scene will be driven primarily by the Conversation, but the backdrop can tell us just as much about the political milieu.

step 3: mechanics

Now that you know where everyone is, emotionally and physically, you can write the Important Conversation itself. This will involve a lot of dialogue, but you can break up big chunks of it by

– describing what is going on around the characters/what the characters are actually doing, and their physical reactions to the conversation – providing more context, like brief(!) flashbacks to what has already happened – describing the characters’ thoughts about this conversation’s implications for their goals, personally

You’ll also want to have an exit strategy; once the plot-moving part of the conversation has occurred, you’ll want to contrive a way of ending the scene, even if the conversation is implied to continue. I’m partial to “jump-cut” transitions that simply skip right to the next bit of action, so we can immediately see the effects of the Important Conversation start to play out, but your setting may also give you an easy out (i.e. if they’re at a restaurant, someone pays the tab).

Hopefully this helps! Go forth and scheme!

#writing

thesesummersonspoet

THINGS WHICH MAKE WRITERS ANXIOUS:

not writing

writing

people reading their stories

people not reading their stories

kedreeva

Editing

Not editing

rhube

Having too many ideas

Having no ideas

#writing #yep

thebestoftumbling

golden eagle having a relaxing time

youwantmuchmore-deactivated2018

This is the world’s largest flying Engine of Murder marveling at the fact that it can actually have its tummy rubbed.

optimysticals

I feel like this is the next step up on “loose your fingers” roulette from petting a kittie’s tummy, but just below belly rubs for say a lion.

naamahdarling

Can someone who knows birds better than I do tell me whether this eagle is as happy as it looks? Because I want it to be happy. It looks so happy. Bewildered by having a friend, but so happy.

suspendnodisbelief

Just popping on this thread to confirm: yes, the eagle is happy about the belly rubs. Golden eagles make this sound when receiving allopreening and similar affectionate and soothing treatment from their parents and mates. It’s the “I am safe and well fed, and somebody familiar is taking good care of me” sound. Angry raptors and wounded raptors make some pretty dramatic hisses and shrieks; frightened raptors go dead silent and try to hide if they can, or fluff up big and get loud and in-your-face if hiding isn’t an option. They can easily sever a finger or break the bones of a human hand or wrist, and even with a very thick leather falconer’s gauntlet, I’ve known falconers to leave a mews (hawk house) with graphic punctures THROUGH the gauntlet into the meat of their hands and arms, just from buteos and kestrels way smaller than this eagle. A pissed off hawk will make damn sure you don’t try twice whatever you pulled that pissed her off, even if she’s been human-imprinted.

If you’re ever unsure about an animal’s level of okayness with something that’s happening, there are three spot-check questions you can ask, to common-sense your way through it:

1. Is the animal capable of defending itself or making a threatening or fearful display, or otherwise giving protest, and if so, is it using this ability? (e.g. dog snarling or biting, swan hissing, horse kicking or biting) 2. Does the animal experience an incentive-based relationship with the human? (i.e. does the animal have a reason, in the animal’s frame of reference, for being near this human? e.g. dog sharing companionship / food / shelter, hawk receiving good quality abundant food and shelter and medical care from a falconer)

3. Is the animal a domesticated species, with at least a full century of consistent species cohabitation with humans? (Domesticated animals frequently are conditioned from birth or by selective breeding to be unbothered by human actions that upset their feral nearest relatives.)

In this situation, YES the eagle can self-defend, YES the eagle has incentive to cooperate with and trust the human handler, and NO the eagle is not a domesticated species, meaning we can expect a high level of reactivity to distress, compared to domestic animals: if the eagle was distressed, it would be pretty visible and apparent to the viewer. These aren’t a universally applicable metric, but they’re a good start for mammal and bird interactions.

Pair that with the knowledge that eagles reserve those chirps for calm environments, and you can be pretty secure and comfy in the knowledge that the big honkin’ birb is happy and cozy.

Also, to anybody wondering, falconers are almost single-handedly responsible for the recovery from near-extinction of several raptor species, including and especially peregrine falcons. Most hawks only live with the falconer for a year, and most of that year is spent getting the bird in ideal condition for survival and success as a wild breeding adult. Falconers are extensively trained and dedicated wildlife conservationists, pretty much by definition, especially in the continental USA, and they make up an unspeakably important part of the overall conservation of predatory bird species. Predatory birds are an important part of every ecosystem they inhabit. Just like apiarists and their bees, the relationship between falconer and hawk is one of great benefit to the animal and the ecosystem, in exchange for a huge amount of time, effort, expense, and education on the part of the human, for very little personal benefit to that one human. It’s definitely not exploitation of the bird, and most hawks working with falconers are hawks who absolutely would not have reached adulthood without human help: the sick, the injured, and the “runts” of the nest who don’t receive adequate resources from their own parents. These are, by and large, wonderful people who are in love with the natural world and putting a lifetime of knowledge and sheer exhausting work into conserving it and its winged wonders.

iopele

reblogged for excellent info, I’m so glad that big gorgeous birb really is as happy as it looks!

osberend

Today’s bit of positive activism: A reminder that, although the world may contain many bad and awful things, it also contains an enormous winged predator clucking happily as a human gives it a belly rub.

wifestre

@jewishmagpie

joaniam

This post has been going around for a while, and if you can, look up this post on Why Animals Do The Thing; that blog got the backstory behind this video. If I’m remembering it right, this is a fairly young golden eagle who was reared by the falconer, who has known he likes a nice relaxing message after a good flying session, which is the situation here. He’d been doing a flying-workout, which is why he has the big ol’ rope on his jesses and why he’s also breathing as heavily as he is.

#wildlife #eagle #happy eagle!

phoenixyfriend

Let’s play a game!

Reblog this post with the general area you live in and which city you mean when you just say “the city.”

Example: I live on Long Island and when I say “I’m going to the city,” I mean NYC.

bethany-sensei

I live in the Willamette Valley, nearer to Salem than to Portland, but when I say “the city” I mean PDX.

#what's the city game #why is the first place that springs to mind St Veit #this place hasn't been the capital of Carinthia in 500 years #and still thinks that is important information #which is why we learnt about this in primary #I mean it's a nice city #you've still got the medieval city walls actually #they're pretty cool #well there's bits of them not the whole city wall intact unfortunately #but it also has 12k inhabitants and the first person mentioned NYC

I live... kind of both in Vienna and in the Glantal (that’s a valley in Carinthia, Austria; for context: I attend uni in Vienna, but grew up in Carinthia and my parents live there), but since I don’t really need to refer to Vienna as “the city” when I’m living in Vienna most of the time, I kinda refer to St. Veit/Glan as “the city”. With all of it’s 12k inhabitants.

So. I still exist, after several months of not logging into Tumblr at all, and am sorry for - well, falling out of contact with the few people here who might’ve missed me. I am also trying to not spiral deeper into depression (yet again), which is. A work in progress, let’s put it like that.

I’m going to try and be online at least sometimes these days.

#crimsonsquare #personal

libraford

Following in the example of @gallusrostromegalus we went and got some tubs for our totally legal vegetable garden. Just fyi, these tubs were $5 each at Big Lots. @autumnhound is drilling holes as we speak, unlike me who stabbed it with my knife like a an aforementioned feral gnome.

libraford

elasticbloodbear

totally legal? how the flying fuck would a vegetable garden be illegal?

We live in a rental house and the owner has told us we can’t do any digging in the yard. Previously, all our vegetables were in low containers but they were too shallow, so we used gallus’s example. Their reason for using tubs was to be HOA-compliant.

gallusrostromegalus

I AM DELIGHTED, HOORAY FOR FERAL ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN GARDENING.

Some troubleshooting:

I’ve had to water way less than I thought because even with the drilled holes the tubs hang onto water, though that may be a function of them being full of potting soil rather than in the thirsty dirt directly.

So learn from my mistakes and don’t leave the dripline on for too long unattended and flood one of them to the point of Buckling.

Wolf Spiders LOVE digging dens in them, and get spooked and caper about when watering, if you get startled by spiders.

Have the relevent section of rules highlighted and acessible when your Landlord tries to complain anyway.

It’s late in the season so maybe also invest in both cheap sheets/tarps/tablecloths (like goodwill-cheap) and some kind of upright thing, so you can toss sheets over them when the frost comes around, as that will extend your growing season quite a bit. I’ve got the tomato cages for that purpose.

Consider labelling things so when people come over and admire your garden and ask “So what do you have?” You have a better answer than “I’ll find out when it blooms”

Or don’t label and surprise yourself.

Next time it rains, go outside with a plastic bag and a spatula and collect free worms for bins

at end of season, mulch dead plants directly into potting soil for nutrition/areation/the seed you forgot will be Free Plants next year

if you were planning to start anything indoors next year, the dirt in these heats up much faster than the ground so you can put things in earlier and cover them.

Don’t plant any zucchini. You don’t want that much Zucchini. You’ll be getting free Zucchini from your neighbors soon enough. Resist.

Anyways, I’m stoked, you maded good color choices and I look forward to seeing more!

theofficialpeanutgallery

what do you mean by, “you’ll be getting free Zucchini from your neighbors soon enough”?

gallusrostromegalus

In many places, but particularly anywhere where there are lots of people who garden, many people plant zucchini because they’ve severely overestimated how much they like zucchini and severely Underestimated how much zucchini a well-pollinated zucchini will produce, and end up with drastically more Zucchini than they can possibly consume, so they end up foisting it off on every possible person who might want to eat a zucchini, but everyone they know ALSO gardens and is in posession of an overabundance of zucchini, so they must resort to subtrefuge, sneaking Zucchini onto the doorsteps of thier neighbors in the middle of the night or putting Zucchini on the seats of cars with open windows, or randomly pitching it into the yards of the hapless victim’s neighbors.

So. Free Zucchini.

kyraneko

Can confirm. You plant a zucchini or two, thinking of how nice those small green squashes are when sliced and put into a stir-fry, and you water them and grow them and make excuses for them when they invade the radishes and snake through the fence to colonize the yard, and you are very vigilant about harvesting the resulting zucchinis when they are small and delicious.

Then, one day, you see it.

Lurking unseen underneath the leaves in a section of the vine you’ve managed to forget to look under recently, a big fat lunker of a zucchini has been growing unhindered, and has attained the size of a loaf of bread. You snatch it up and haul ass to your kitchen, where you look at it in between sorties into the cupboard for a cookbook that has a zucchini bread recipe with a sense of foreboding.

It was only the first. The vines have grown and spread far and wide, and there is too much botanical real estate under those wide green leaves for you to search every morning; even when the plant was small and you were fresh and well-rested after the winter’s lull in gardening chores, you picked every zucchini you saw, but there was never a way for you to know if you saw every zucchini there was.

Spoiler: you didn’t.

You missed them, and they kept growing, and now, in the high summer’s heat and with the vines spreading out all over the garden like an octopus with suburban sprawl, there is so much more zucchini plant than you can search every day, and when you do, the small tasty zucchinis are outnumbered by the monster ones, and after picking up and hauling in a couple massive squash that could be drilled out and used as cannon in a late Middle Ages succession dispute, you have no heart to continue searching the entire plant; you retreat indoors with bold plans that you’ll do it tomorrow, which will be abandoned after searching one-seventh of the vine yields something much like a watermelon crossed with a runner duck, and its identical triplets.

At some point, flinging them into the yard of your least favorite neighbor just seems like the thing to do.

themiscyra1983

I have never eaten zucchini and I don’t believe I shall ever plant it because it sounds absolutely horrifying.

kyraneko

Buy them small and inert at the grocery store, slice them, and stir-fry them. Or slice them and steam them with other vegetables and rice to go with some kind of meat.

Growing them in the garden is the horticultural equivalent of challenging Satan to a dance-off. Regret comes hot on the heels of utter exhaustion, accompanied by despair like shit on a sundae. You might still have your soul at the end of things, but you will also have zucchini, and you will question whether it was worth it.

#zucchini #I can eat zucchini for a month sometimes?#if it happens in summer that's awesome

As someone who comes from a family that regularly has the problem of “What are we going to do with all the zucchini”:

Do plant them in the garden.

Then feed everyone in your surroundings.

Your friends. Your roommates. The local kindergarden. Your aunt’s chickens.

Try to convince people to take zucchini in queer meet-ups. Vary recipes as much as possible, and invite people for food.

(All things I and/or my family have done.)

aggressivelyarospec

Gen and Aro Prompts

(I am sorry this is so late, this is exam week for me and I am exceptionally tired.)

So, about a year ago (more or less), I started a prompt meme on AO3, called “Gen and Aro Prompts”, to encourage people to write more gen stories, and/or stories involving aro-spec characters.

It’s still open, anyone can still contribute, and if you want to write something, that would be really, really awesome. (Especially for those people who want someone to help write out their aro headcanons, but no one who knows the fandom has stumbled over it yet.)

If you want to submit a prompt, and maybe hope someone interested stumbles over it, please do!

So far, there’s 31 prompts, and 26 works.

Not all of those works include explicitely aro characters, but 23 out of 26 (if I counted correctly) means that fics featuring aro characters are by far in the majority.

There’s fics exploring aromanticism in worlds with soulmates, fics exploring certain characters as aromantic, people-coming-out-fics…

Some of my favourites (because there’s too many of them, I can’t list them all):

Of Arrows and Soulmates - the oldest fic in the collection, predating the prompt meme, featuring the Hawkeyes as platonic soulmates. Kind of light-hearted and nice and you can feel the relief when both realize they’re platonic soulmates?

Immortality - I adore how comfy Pidge gets to be with being aro… , and also that this was written in response to one of my prompts; features a Pidge without a soulmate where people start ageing when they meet theirs.

Flingerlings - featuring aro Luna and Harry, and one of my favourite rejections of amatonormativity. Also starring Snape’s corpse, and the rejection of amatonormativity includes Snape’s actions, and just - go read it.

Pangur Bán and Me - Hermione and Millicent Bulstrode both get to be aro immortal friends. It’s awesome. Also, Millicent has an immortal cat. I am probably not very good at descriptions.

The Only One They Ever Reared - Sirius and Remus have to watch tiny!Harry while his parents are away.

Mattie vs Amatonormativity - Mattie (from the Art of Escaping) discovers the concept of being aro. And aro-allo. I really just… like this kind of fic, even if I have no idea about the fandom?

We Won’t Ever Say Goodbye - another world where people don’t start ageing until meeting their soulmates, and even more non-soulmated aros - this time, it’s Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton and Pepper Potts from the MCU. This is one of several fics I start reading when being surrounded by romance gets to be too much.

Getting Lost With You (600800 Seconds From Valentine’s Day) - where Lavender is an aro robot, and her inner monologue is awesome. Also has a ranty author’s note I’m really fond of. (I should probably comment on it, finally…)

(I also wrote a fic with an aro Luna Lovegood “Romantic Love and Crumple-Horned Snorkacks (Through the Years)”, that is… at least 70% me projecting my experiences growing up onto her and mixing in some bits I heard from other people about them growing up? At least some people didn’t find that unenjoyable.)

I… haven’t really kept up with the newer fics, because uni, and I left out a lot of good ones because this post was starting to get too long, but - yeah.

There’s quite something there already, and I really would like for a lot of those fics to get more comments and kudos, and to just see more fics in general.

(Also, question to the mods of this blog: Can I just go and submit aro fic that gets submitted to the prompt meme to you throughout the year?)

—————

Mod Caro: Of course! They won’t be added to our AO3 Collection or tagged as part of our Fanwork event, but we’ll gladly share it with the rest of the community if you send them to us.

#AAW19 #reblog #gen and aro prompts

find-the-beauty-within

The person I reblogged this from deserves to be happy

priincessolivee-deactivated2025

I tried to scroll past this. I really did

invisiblelad

I feel like minor acts of kindness and good intentions are really important on days like this.

#chain meme

arotaro

So I have… absolutely No Idea whether this interests you, but I might have made buttons for myself with your aro-allo flag, or the closest I could get with coloured pencils.

OH????