Hello, I just want to make it clear that @malmarshes is my official blog for any work I do such as art and writing. This is just my reblog account which I end up following people on. ďżźđ
what do you mean elon musk did a nazi salute on live tv at the united states presidential inauguration twice and is now erasing the evidence off the internet by replacing the footage with the crowd cheering instead?
would be a shame if people reblogged this, wouldnât it?
Imagine Grace defined his name as the elegance definition of grace and Rocky spends years thinking how fucking ironic this clumsy leaky space blobs name is.
Until Grace slips out a sentence along the lines of "could you give me a little grace here" and Rocky immediately points out he used a word wrong so Grace has to explain that yeah, grace means elegance but it can also mean mercy sometimes too.
And Rocky has to suddenly reconcile that the clumsy leaky blob that saved his life twice, that almost certainly doomed himself to come back for him, name is Mercy.
Hey artists, C. Spike Trotman, founder of Iron Circus Comics, just posted an invaluable thread on depicting different types of black hair. Iâd do the thing where you screencap the whole thread and post it but itâs just too long (which is great because itâs a whole lot of useful information!) Give her a follow while youâre there.
Anyway, go check it out. I just wanted to save it and share it because I didnât know how much I didnât know!
This is an amazing resource, not only for artists, but for writers too! I love this!
{ID - tweet from @/Iron_Spike that reads, âBlack Hair for Non-Black Artists: a Cheat Sheet Thread. Hi, folks! Just spur-of-the-moment decided to put together some reference for folks who want to draw/model black characters in their work, but arent confident they wonât make simple, obvious mistakes w/r/t black hair. END ID}
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
online communities are so strange because people slip away so easily. you can be on here for years, folding people you've never met into the fabric of your daily life, and then they disappear, leaving only ghost posts scattered across tumblr behind. or their blog stays dormant, for weeks, months, years, until you're only still following them because you remember that they love sunflowers or they were kind to you when they didn't have to be or the last thing they posted was sad and raw and you still worry about them sometimes.
and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.
there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't think anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.
i hope you're all okay out there. i hope the sun is shining on your face and you are breathing deeply. i miss you.
I wanted to signal boost this situation. SpectroliteAAA, in the past known as WalkingMelonsAAA, is in serious need of help.
I have been extremely close with them since meeting them in 2017 (or 2018? A while!). Ten years I've known Spectrolite, and she is truly one of the most wonderful, kind, and talented people I have ever met. When money was tight on my end, or when life problems would come by way, she dropped everything and helped me through the worst of times. I, and everyone else who knows her, are genuinely, absolutely blessed to have had her in our lives.
This last year has been devastating for her. I have watched her go from financially secure, and thriving, to counting pennies to see if she could even afford food. We have had phone calls about her terror of being evicted, and it broke my heart to see someone I loved so much, hurting so badly.
I have the video here she posted on her youtube channel, and I also linked the GoFundMe. Below the keep reading line is information directly from the GoFundMe as well, describing the situation in full.
I know money is tight for everyone in this current hellscape, so if you can share, or post this around? I know she'd be grateful...!
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Thank you all for being here.
Hello everyone, thank you so much for coming to our GoFundMe. Our names are Alyssa, and Sabrina. We are a queer couple, who need immediate financial aid so that we do not become evicted, and thus threaten our lives into homelessness. We are artists that run our own merchandise businesses, and with the launch of the tariffs and the economic impacts within the United States of America, our businesses completely collapsed in May 2025. We have fought ceaselessly all of last year to try and adapt and bounce back, but all of our efforts have completely failed... We began to fall behind on rent last November, and was keeping up just enough to get us this far. However, as of last month in February, all of our resources depleted, and we are sinking very fast.
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What happened.
We are one of many people who are grossly effected with the current conditions of the United States. We are being targeted negatively by our country for being queer, losing Human Rights, and the rise of false information to dehumanize us for being transgender, yet, that isn't even what put us in this situation at all! We have been surviving So Much that we can't even stress about our freedoms being threatened. Our lives were completely destroyed over night do to Trump's decisions impacting the economy and thus our businesses, particularly with the start of the Tariffs. It has been downhill since.
These are our pools of income as with its history to illustrate the fall of our livelihoods.
The drop across all platforms is daunting.
After 10 years of making art our profession as independents, we understand how to be flexible and adaptable with ever changing business strategies, economic climates, trends, outreach, marketability etc. Having one pool of income falling through, is something we've experienced and have always managed to adapt too. Usually that is at the fault of the platform, or covid taking in-person conventions away. However, with every source of income both online and in-person, being not just down, but totally slashed to the degree that is being shown, it is clearly evident that these are impacts of the overarching economy that have no hint of leaving any time soon. It's especially evident, because we travel all over the country visiting many States to sell at conventions, and it is every single State, that is 60%-90% down on profits.
With inflation, and a corporate/capitalist rise in Art/Pop Culture Conventions, table costs to these events are becoming so expensive that we have lost the majority of our tour schedule. Last year we barley survived because we had 10 conventions, while this year for 2026, we were only able to keep 3... We cannot afford to renew tables that now cost $500-$1500+, when we made $1200 gross income at that convention. We cannot afford to fly to conventions because of the cost of flights are so high. Product both domestic because of inflation, and international outsourcing because of the trade war, have become so expensive that we cannot afford restock. Nor can we afford a sustainable quantity of inventory for new product to secure future income. Raising prices for our product to compensate for inflation, only brings lesser sales as well...
Alyssa has applied to 78 jobs, and Sabrina has applied to just as many, and yet we CANNOT find even an entry level position!... So many weeks and hours looking for such a solution, has thus far only proven to be a complete waste of time. Now with the debt so out of hand, getting a job well over minimum wage wouldn't even be enough to save us if one of us were hired a month ago! Doordashing where we live to find an immediate source of income, cannot keep us afloat either for the time it takes to make as little as $80 at peak times of the day. Alyssa tried opening commissions, but not only is it not sustainable, but her mental health has been so shot under all this stress, that Alyssa cannot accept anymore commissions. We jumped on doing our taxes Feb, and gave our tax information to our specialist March 5th, but we still have yet to receive our tax returns to apply for any kind of governmental assistance for financial aid or economic relief. Clearly, we cannot wait for either our tax specialist to finish our returns, nor the time of the application period on the State of Oregon to give us anything if we get approved.
Living like this with having no idea when/if it would end, we drained our savings, and maxed all our credit cards, hoping we'd bounce back to recovery! but things have only gotten worse, and after a year of fighting, we now have nothing left...
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What we need, and what to do.
Since May 2025, we believed perhaps this would be a rough patch that would turn around in a few months with some extra effort to adapt, so we did our best to try and fight for our 4 year rental lease. However, this has proven to become just our foreseeable future, and we cannot stay in our current rental. It is eating us alive. Every day has been a race against the clock anticipating next month's rent of $2700, and that is a ton of money when you aren't making nearly anything at all.
We moved into a TownHome March 2025 with the income we had prior to May 2025. We had the faith of a successful business that has proven stable and dependable for the last 10 years, even through the Covid Shutdown in 2020. Then just two months after moving into a place that was below our means, our rental suddenly became scarily WAY above our means. Everything we had worked so hard to achieve, was taken away instantly, immediately putting us in survival mode practically over night. We cannot stay in this rental. We must pay our debt, break the lease, and get out before our rental history is destroyed with an eviction. It is unsustainable, and with two months behind on rent, and a third around the corner, we can't make money to recover to pay that debt, ontop of breaking the lease, ourselves. This isn't even the money we technically need in addition, to find a new place to live after... We are in serious need of big help.
As is so common to the queer experience, Alyssa does not have any family to reach out too for help, aside from one charished member, her younger Sister with her inner family of 4 kids. Sabrina has some family, but they too are horribly effected by the economic state of our country and is barley surviving with little to give. Our chosen family with our friends and partners are in a similar position. We humbly approach anyone here willing to throw anything to help save us from homelessness, or spread the word on any platform or via word of mouth, to restart our lives in a small apartment that we can live in under these circumstances. We truly have nowhere else to turn, this GoFundMe is our last resort...
We are currently behind on rent by $5,268. In exactly a week from today starting April, it will become $7,968. Oh my...! That means, to get out, we need like... $10,000... to pay the debt, and break the lease. We are offering our deposit to the landlord, but that doesn't change the ridiculous amount of money we need to get ourselves out of this situation.
hey if this storm ends up being as it looks, you need to take it seriously, particularly if you're in a southern state and not used to storms like this. i'm not a professional but my new england experience for losing power/etc is:
fill your bathtub with water before the power goes out. in an emergency where the pipes freeze, you'll have semi-clean water. you can use this water for your pets, to wash dishes, flush your toilet, and other small important stuff. if you have no bathtub, fill as large a bin/pot/etc as you can find.
air is the best insulator. if you can tape plastic over your windows and major drafts, it will genuinely help. (they have kits for it, but i've used trash bags and duct tape). blankets/tarps/etc also work. leave space between the covering and the window - the layer of air protects you. shove towels under your doors.
in a true emergency, you can ball up newspapers and shove them into your coats/pants/etc between your base layer and your coat. it won't be comfortable but it does insulate a little better.
have an emergency plan for your pets, particularly animals like reptiles that need constant heat to survive.
the weight of the snow and ice will be an issue. plan accordingly.
black ice is a bitch. if it looks "wet", assume it is frozen. actually just assume everything is frozen for a little while.
if you do not have a generator or other emergency power source, DO NOT bring outside-use heat sources (like propane stoves) inside. you can gas yourself and die.
instead, if you truly have no heat source: focus on insulating a small amount of space in your house - a few rooms - and bring as many bodies and supplies in there as possible. do not break insulation if you can avoid it. you are a ~100-degree object. make your safe space into a blanket fort. you may go stircrazy but it is better than freezing.
if you have a fireplace you never use, check the flue and the chimney before the storm holy shit. i am not kidding about this. do not just start a fire willy nilly. you will burn your house down.
relatedly, if you start a fire and notice smoke is billowing back into the house: stop the fire immediately. your flue is closed or your chimney is backed up. you will burn your house down.
keep the fridge closed as long as possible; it lets the air out. but honestly like, my family has used snow as a fridge a lot. stuff that needs to stay cool will be less of an issue than things that need to get warm. plan accordingly.
most canned things can be eaten cold, but check the label. if you have a little sterno fire, it can go a long way.
if you develop a headache and feel weirdly sleepy, you may be forced to open a window. you might have carbon monoxide poisoning.
every year people die while shoveling snow. it is actually not very safe as a chore tbh. you need to go slow and take lots of breaks. you should also 100% wait until the snow has actually passed, only because when it starts shifting and undoes all your work, it will piss you the hell off.
have drinking water somewhere easily accessible. a lot more of it than you think completely necessary tbh.
fill your gas tank. it will help prevent your lines from freezing.
if you have a battery-powered light that's not very strong, put it under a water jug, it'll throw more light. idk why it works but it works.
just because you know how to drive in the snow doesn't mean other people know how to drive in the snow. better to just not.
your device probably has a "low power mode". probably best to just keep it on asap rather than be taken by surprise tbh. the battery will last longer.
great news to fanfiction writers: it really is better if y'all take one bed and huddle together for warmth. do not strip out of your clothes, though, i have no idea who the hell decided that was the smart thing to do. you want to keep at least a layer of leggings and a tight shirt on. the goal is to find the fine line between "warm" and "sweating" - you want to stay as dry as possible for as long as possible.
your hair, eyelashes, and nosehairs can freeze. just from personal experience: try not to rub or touch them, it can snap your hair off and then you'll be very sad.
hypothermia is a lot faster and more evil than most people expect. watch for shivering, confusion, and unexplained exhaustion. if someone stops shivering, that is not always a good sign. if you think you/someone you love has hypothermia, warm them up slowly. often this is through rubbing/friction (or a heat source if available). keep them awake and try to feed them something.
same for frostbite: don't just shove your hands into a fire. warm any affected area slowly. fair warning, as the blood recirculates, it will hurt :(
those blue rubber examination gloves under other gloves can help even very-cold hands stay warm.
liquor is not a good idea to drink right now, sorry beloved. but vodka/rubbing alcohol does work as an excellent de-icer if you need something small done quickly (like a lock/door handle). it's just, like, expensive in comparison to other things lol
"i don't eat that much anyway i'll be fine" that's the devil talking. you will not be. you will also probably be burning way more calories than normal. let the soft animal of your body eat a bunch of delicious snacks.
Also DRIP YOUR FAUCETS. This helps reduce the risk of your pipes freezing; frozen pipes won't give you any water when you need it but they also can expand and crack or even burst, leading to very very pricey repairs.
It doesn't need to be a lot, a thin steady stream, just enough to get water flow through your pipes. The most at-risk pipes are the ones on the exterior of the house so look for faucets on or near exterior walls. If you're dripping the faucet for your bathroom sink, also drip the shower and/or tub faucet because they can absolutely freeze separately and that sucks a lot.
There might be some absolutely gorgeous trees that are COVERED in a layer of ice like this:
They are beautiful but they are also EXTREMELY dangerous. That ice is much heavier than it looks and these are the trees whose branches are going to break under that weight, potentially falling on roads, homes, cars, and people. Thin or fragile trees can break entirely. If your home has branches like this above any rooms, DO NOT USE THOSE ROOMS IF YOU HAVE ANY OTHER OPTIONS. If you are around trees like that, move quickly and listen for any sound of cracking or groaning from the tree; breaks can happen with very little warning.
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