steampunk aesthetics: Benjamin Carré, Disabled Life Media, Hatton Cross Steampunk, Daniel Valdez, steampunk-design.de, rabbittooth.com
Three Goblin Art

tannertan36
h
taylor price

@theartofmadeline

blake kathryn
Keni
Cosimo Galluzzi
Stranger Things
occasionally subtle
Show & Tell

titsay

No title available
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

No title available

Origami Around
🪼
Xuebing Du

oozey mess
YOU ARE THE REASON

seen from United States

seen from Türkiye
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Türkiye

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Türkiye

seen from Italy

seen from Malaysia

seen from Türkiye
seen from Greece
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Austria
seen from Malaysia

seen from Germany
@dangerousvisions170
steampunk aesthetics: Benjamin Carré, Disabled Life Media, Hatton Cross Steampunk, Daniel Valdez, steampunk-design.de, rabbittooth.com
Ah, gotta love Jezebel’s consistency here. Less than a week ago, they published “The Many Misguided Reasons Famous Ladies Say I’m Not a Feminist”. They went on beating that dead pony right up to the point of splashing putrid flesh with the usual finger pointing at Beyonce, among others. Not a...
Loving Joss Whedon also means keeping an eye on him - although he's responsible for some of my favorite media moments, although watching Buffy makes me feel empowered and I love what he has to say about strong female characters, he's also the guy who cast no asians in his asian-inspired sf world, the guy who conflated sex work and rape in the basic premise of Dollhouse.
Anyway, the genderist thing privileges semantics over history, which is why I still id as a feminist - because in doing so I link myself to a history of progressive white and Black female activists who used the name, complete with all the problematic baggage of that history.
Chapter 14, "Steerforth's Arm: Love and the Moral Point of View."
A room of one’s own / Virginia Woolf
A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psychoanalysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom — all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had. It referred me unmistakably to the one book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the professor’s statement about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. My heart had leapt. My cheeks had burnt. I had flushed with anger.
...focuses on problems of personal identity, particularly the role of the physical in determining personhood. In this science-fiction context, identity may be affected by bioengineering, genetic manipulation, cloning, and medical technology allowing the replacement of failing systems and the prolonging of life. Some stories explore the relationships among child-rearing, pair-bonding (romantic love), and sexual activity.
The various forms of society and government Bujold presents often reflect 20th-century politics. In many novels, there is a contrast between the technology-rich egalitarian democratic socialism of Beta Colony and the heroic, militaristic, hierarchical society of Barrayar, where personal relationships must ensure societal continuity. Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, the protagonist of most of the series, is the son of a Betan mother and a Barrayaran aristocrat, embodying this contrast.
To punish Minos, Aphrodite made Pasiphaë, Minos' wife, fall deeply in love with the bull. Pasiphaë had the archetypal craftsman Daedalus make a hollow wooden cow, and climbed inside it in order to mate with the white bull. The offspring was the monstrous Minotaur. Pasiphaë nursed him in his infancy, but he grew and became ferocious, being the unnatural offspring of man and beast, he had no natural source of nourishment and thus devoured man for sustenance. Minos, after getting advice from the oracle at Delphi, had Daedalus construct a gigantic labyrinth to hold the Minotaur. Its location was near Minos' palace in Knossos.
from Lois McMaster Bujold, "Labyrinth"
The huge rippling shadow struck out of nowhere, at incredible speed. It grabbed the rat by its tail and swung it squealing against a pillar, dashing out its brains with a crunch. A flash of a thick claw-like fingernail, and the white furry body was ripped open from sternum to tail. Frantic fingers peeled the skin away from the rat's body as blood splattered. Miles first saw the fangs as they bit and tore and buried themselves in the rat's tissues.
They were functional fangs, not just decorative, set in a protruding jaw, with long lips and a wide mouth; yet the total effect was lupine rather than simian. A flat nose, ridged, powerful brows, high cheekbones. Hair a dark matted mess. And yes, fully eight feet tall, a rangy, tense-muscled body.
/
They didn't tell me it was female.
….
They didn't tell me she talked.
....
They didn't tell me she wept.
from Lois McMaster Bujold, "Labyrinth"
Little decorative colored sparkles defined the spherical field of a large null-gee bubble. Floating within it was a woman. Her ivory arms flashed against her green silk clothes as she played. All four of her ivory arms.... She wore a flowing, kimono-like belted jacket and matching shorts, from which the second set of arms emerged where her legs should have been. Her hair was short and soft and ebony black. Her eyes were closed, and her rose-tinted face bore the repose of an angel, high and distant and terrifying.
Her strange instrument was fixed in air before her, a flat polished wooden frame strung across both top and bottom with a bewildering array of tight gleaming wires, soundboard between. She struck the wires with four felted hammers with blinding speed, both sides at once, her upper hands moving at counterpoint to her lowers. Music poured forth in a cascade.
"Good God," said Thorne, "it's a quaddie."
/
Nicol, now wearing a white tunic and shorts trimmed with pink piping, lay sprawled on her belly on a bench watching the repairs. It gave Miles an odd sensation to see her out of her cup, it was like looking at a hermit crab out of its shell, or a seal on the shore. She looked strangely vulnerable in one-gee, yet in null gee she'd looked so right, so clearly at ease, he'd stopped noticing the oddness of the extra arms very quickly.
/
Nicol appeared in the doorway balanced in a float chair, a hovering tubular cup that seemed to be looking for its saucer, enameled in a blue that precisely matched her eyes. She slipped it through the doorway as easily as a woman twitching her hips, zipped to a halt near Miles's table, and adjusted the height to that of a person sitting. The controls, run by her lower hands, left her uppers entirely free. The lower body support must have been custom-designed just for her. Miles watched her maneuver with great interest. He hadn't been sure she could even live outside her null-gee bubble. He'd expected her to be weak. She didn't look weak. She looked determined.
from Lois McMaster Bujold, "Labyrinth"
Miles shrugged carefully. "Human is as human does." He forced himself to reach out and touch her damp cheek. "Animals don't weep, Nine."
She jerked, as from an electric shock. "Animals don't lie. Humans do. All the time."
"Not all the time." He hoped the light was too dim for her to see the flush in his face. She was watching his face intently.
"Prove it." She tilted her head as she sat cross-legged. Her pale gold eyes were suddenly burning, speculative.
"Uh... sure. How?"
"Take off your clothes."
"... what?"
"Take off your clothes, and lie down with me as humans do. Men and women." Her hand reached out to touch his throat.
/
She was not without a certain... charm was not the word-whatever beauty there was to be found in the strong, the swift, the leanly athletic, the functioning form. Once you got used to the scale of it. She radiated a smooth heat he could feel from here-animal magnetism? the suppressed observer in the back of his brain supplied. Power? Whatever else it was, it would certainly be astonishing.
One of his mother's favorite aphorisms drifted through his head. Anything worth doing, she always said, is worth doing well.
/
"You really do have the most elegant cheekbones," he told her, tracing their line with one finger. She leaned into his touch, cuddled up equally to him and the heat pipe. "There's a woman on my ship who wears her hair in a sort of woven braid in the back-it would look just great on you. Maybe she could teach you how."
She pulled a wad of her hair forward and looked cross-eyed at it, as if trying to see past the coarse tangles and filth. She touched his face in turn. "You are very handsome, Admiral."
"Huh? Me?" He ran a hand over the night's beard stubble, sharp features, the old pain lines... she must be blinded by my putative rank, eh?
"Your face is very... alive. And your eyes see what they're looking at."
"Nine..." he cleared his throat, paused. "Dammit, that's not a name, that's a number. What happened to Ten?"
"He died." Maybe I will too, her strange-colored eyes added silently, before her lids shuttered them.
/
Miles knelt beside her. "Taura dear, are you all right?" He gently lifted one clawed hand to check her pulse, which was bounding. Nicol gave him a rather strange look at his tender gesture, her float chair was wedged as far from Taura as it could get.
"Hungry," Taura gasped.
"Again? But of course, all that energy expenditure. Anybody got a ration bar?" A quick check found an only-slightly-nibbled rat bar in the stunned trooper's thigh pocket, which Miles immediately liberated. Miles smiled benignly at Taura as she wolfed it down; she smiled back as best she could with her mouth full. No more rats for you after this, Miles promised silently. Three steak dinners when we get back to the Ariel, and a couple of chocolate cakes for dessert....
/
"It was your good luck," Miles plunged on, "that I'd lost my men and was disarmed when we finally met. Canaba lied to me, too. In his defense, he seems to have had some dim idea of saving you from a brutal life as Ryoval's slave. He sent me to kill you, Taura. He sent me to slay a monster, when he should have been begging me to rescue a princess in disguise. I'm not too pleased with Dr. Canaba. Nor with myself. I lied through my teeth to you down in Ryoval's basement, because I thought I had to, to survive and win."
Her face was confused, congealing, the light in her eyes fading. "Then you didn't... really think I was human-"
"On the contrary. Your choice of test was an excellent one. It's much harder to lie with your body than with your mouth. When I, er, demonstrated my belief, it had to be real."
from Lois McMaster Bujold, "Labyrinth"
Bel Thorne, the Ariel's commander, was a Betan hermaphrodite, man/woman descendant of a centuries-past genetic-social experiment every bit as bizarre, in Miles's private opinion, as anything rumored to be done for money by House Ryoval's ethics-free surgeons. A fringe effort of Betan egalitarianism run amok, hermaphroditism had not caught on, and the original idealists' hapless descendants remained a minority on hyper-tolerant Beta Colony. Except for a few stray wanderers like Bel. As a mercenary officer Thorne was conscientious, loyal, and aggressive, and Miles liked him/her/it- Betan custom used the neuter pronoun-a lot. However....
Miles could smell Bel's floral perfume from here. Bel was emphasizing the female side today. And had been, increasingly, for the five days of this voyage. Normally Bel chose to come on ambiguous-to-male, soft short brown hair and chiselled, beardless facial features counteracted by the grey-and-white Dendarii military uniform, assertive gestures, and wicked humor. It worried Miles exceedingly to sense Bel soften in his presence.
/
Who was he to judge another, Miles reflected ruefully, whose own body brought him so little joy? What did Bel, straight and healthy and of normal height, if unusual genital arrangements, find so attractive in a little half-crippled part-time crazy man? He glanced down at the grey Dendarii officer's uniform he wore. The uniform he had won. If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.
/
Thorne grinned. "You got it. You're an almost perfect Betan, y'know? Almost. You have the accent, the in-jokes..."
Miles went a little still. "Where do I fail?" Thorne touched Miles's cheek; Miles flinched. "Reflexes," said Thorne.
from Lois McMaster Bujold, "Labyrinth"
"What else do you wish for, Taura?" Miles asked earnestly.
Slowly she replied. "I wish I were normal."
Miles was silent too. "I can't give you what I don't possess myself," he said at length. The words seemed to lie in inadequate lumps between them. He roused himself to a better effort. "No. Don't wish that. I have a better idea. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what you're best at, and develop it. Hopscotch your weaknesses. There isn't time for them. Look at Nicol-"
"So beautiful," sighed Taura.
"Or look at Captain Thorne, and tell me what 'normal' is, and why I should give a damn for it. Look at me, if you will. Should I kill myself trying to overcome men twice my weight and reach in unarmed combat, or should I shift the ground to where their muscle is useless, 'cause it never gets close enough to apply its strength? I haven't got time to lose, and neither have you."
"Do you know how little time?" demanded Taura suddenly. "Ah..." said Miles cautiously, "do you?" "I am the last survivor of my creche mates. How could I not know?" Her chin lifted defiantly.
"Then don't wish to be normal," said Miles passionately, rising to pace. "You'll only waste your precious time in futile frustration. Wish to be great! That at least you have a fighting chance for. Great at whatever you are. A great trooper, a great sergeant. A great quartermaster, for God's sake, if that's what comes with ease. A great musician like Nicol-only think how horrible if she were wasting her talents trying to be merely normal." Miles paused self-consciously in his pep talk, thinking, Easier to preach than practice....
Taura studied her polished claws, and sighed. "I suppose it's useless for me to wish to be beautiful, like Sergeant Anderson."
"It is useless for you to try to be beautiful like anyone but yourself," said Miles. "Be beautiful like Taura, ah, that you can do. Superbly well."
Lois McMaster Bujold, from "Labyrinth"
"But she was my project-I must answer for her-"
"No. She's a free woman now. She must answer for herself."
"How free can she ever be, in that body, driven by that metabolism, that face-a freak's life-better to die painlessly, than to have all that suffering inflicted on her-"
Miles spoke through his teeth. With emphasis. "No. It's. Not." Canaba stared at him, shaken out of the rutted circle of his unhappy reasoning at last.
That's right, doctor, Miles's thought glittered. Get your head out of your ass and look at me. Finally.
Supernatural vid, "Women's Work," by Luminosity and sisabet
"Buffy vs Edward (Twilight Remixed)" by Jonathan McIntosh
Twilight vid, "Open Your Houses," by sweetestdrain
Firefly vid, "Secret Asian Man," by shati
Firefly vid with audio from Pulp Fiction, “Shepherds,” by ghost_lingering
streaming password: Book