Jules of Nature
$LAYYYTER
KIROKAZE
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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JVL
Three Goblin Art
tumblr dot com
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
todays bird
DEAR READER
ojovivo
art blog(derogatory)
Kiana Khansmith
Not today Justin
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Keni
⁂
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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@feamir
easter sucks i don’t think we should have widespread christianity events permeating our neighborhoods. however, i like that somehow this became a rabbit-centric time of the year. i propose we overturn easter and replace it with a celebration of bunny girls. give it to the trans furries. they can like, graze on fields of grass and do freak sex stuff or whatever. let’s go lesbians
that happens already. oviposition commissions spike every time
happy oviposition commission weekend
ill spend my twenties investigating the healing properties of salt i dont know about you guys
excuse me
Sorry op. That's my friend the Salt Vampire from the Star Trek episode "The Man Trap" which first aired in 1966. Blessings be upon you.
its just i dont feel blessed by its presence is all. sending love your way
it’s actually quite easy to take over a small local government group if you really want to, bc if you volunteer consistently people will just put you in charge of whatever. I’m now one of like three people at a nature preserve making official decisions about trails, putting in a prairie, and designing a series of illustrations for a storybook trail etc., and it’s just because last summer I started coming over once a week to help the naturalist out for a couple hours. Mine now. you too can steal an organization and shape it to your will 🫵
[Modern Day AU] Lan Sizhui: What do you guys say when you answer the phone? Ouyang Zizhen: What up? Lan Jingyi: Who is this? Jin Ling: No, she’s dead. This is her son.
reblog for easter
forget april fools day its almost time for the best video on this entire fuckin planet
sunglasses. no sun. it’s cloudy: overcast.
I’m having a stupid thought so you all have to hear it: a scene in the movie (I don’t think it’s in the book) The Stepford Wives has the kids get on the bus in their new town and look around in horror to see every other child looking depressed and haunted. My thought is that those kids, who clearly know something is very wrong in town and that their parents are lying about it, could make up the main character party of the world’s darkest Kids on Bikes adventure ever. (”This season on Stepford Things, Mary and Gina find a copy of mom’s arm that appears to be a spare, and set fire to the community center!”)
This! This was my thought when I was watching the movie and reading the book. That this is so scary, but would be even more so if it was from the kid’s point of view, if done realistically. In the book there was a scene when a child commented on the change, but positively, since mom now made better breakfast or something. To me that’s not realistic child reaction and it was the one scene I disliked in the book.
Think about it. You are, let’s say, 8. You are young but not stupid. You KNOW this person is not your mommy - one day mom was mom, then someone started impersonating her, and real mom disappeared. Your dad is still dad, you are sure, but he is pretending not to notice mom is not mom. But you know he HAS to see it, because he knew mom, and this person is nothing like her, outside of appearance. She lost all her personality and sense of humor, she lost all her thoughts and hobbies, and is eerie and pleasant constantly.
So now you are 8, live with a bizarre imposter pretending to be your mom, and your dad - the one person you should be able to seek protection from - is lying about it being mom, for some reason you can’t comprehend.
All your friends have the same problem. You talk quietly about it during school breaks - all their daddies are lying, too… You have no one to talk to, because you are freaking 8. No one will listen.
I need this.
Yeah, when I read the kid being happy that his mom is making hot breakfast now, I thought this can’t possibly last.
For the girls- what’s going to happen to them? Even Stepford men probably don’t want to have robot offspring who never age, but something is bound to go horribly wrong.
For the boys- is this a metaphor for growing up under the patriarchy or growing up seeing your mom getting abused? Either way, somebody is going to clash with his dad.
the dynamic between two people who love a third person so much and come to understand each other because of that is so important to me. you would put them first, and so would i. you understand why we have to save them from themself. i trust you with their life, and so, that means more than if i trusted you with mine. the love doesn't have to be the same, but it's powerful enough that you understand why you're not the only satellite drawn into their orbit.
"I’ve already pretty much revealed that Alecto begins with the descent of Christ into Hades." - Tamsyn Muir
That's right...it's time for more Bible study for fans of weird queer necromancers!
It's currently Holy Week, the week where Western liturgical Christians reenact the events of Jesus' death and resurrection in real time. And today, it's Holy Saturday. So Jesus died on the cross on Good Friday. He rises from the dead on Easter Sunday. But what happened in between? His body lay in the tomb...but his spirit was otherwise preoccupied. Because on Holy Saturday, Jesus went to Hell.
But why would Jesus go to Hell? Because the resurrection was not just about saving the people who came after it - it was a bit more...wibbly wobbly, timey wimey.
To be a bit more specific, he didn't visit Hell Hell. The place Jesus visited isn't Hell in the sense of eternal punishment of the damned, but Hades or Sheol or the Underworld or Limbo - a place for those who were mostly good but lived before Jesus' resurrection had made salvation possible. So before his resurrection, Jesus went to make that salvation retroactive. Particularly, according to tradition, to major figures from the Old Testament, including Adam and Eve.
So Nona the Ninth ended with Harrow walking off into the River in search of theological truth. And Alecto the Ninth apparently begins with Harrow in Hell:
Alecto the Ninth, ACT ONE HARROW IN HELL CHAPTER 1 At a point in the slit she was carving through life, Harrowhark Nonagesimus woke to find herself lost in a dark wound. She had been walking when it had all gone black– any path ahead or behind was blotted out; now she was here. - Tamsyn Muir reading at TorCon
This is riffing heavily on the beginning of Dante's Inferno:
"In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost." - Dante Alighieri, Inferno
But lots of people go to Hell. What's so special about Harrow going there? Because the traditional name in English for Jesus' chthonic salvation adventures on Holy Saturday is "the Harrowing of Hell." "Harrow" comes from an Old English word meaning to attack or despoil - a very martial way of expressing the idea of Jesus as the victor over sin and death.
Harrow ended NTN realising that she cannot trust John's account of metaphysics. That she needs to discover the reality for herself. The faith of the Nine Houses and John's own styling as god rests on the foundation of the Resurrection - John is the "ransomer of death, scourge of death, vindicator of death", his power is understood to be absolute: "Let the whole of everywhere entrust themselves to him. Let those across the river pledge beyond the tomb to the adept divine."
And yet even that prayer - "let those across the river..." - introduces doubt. Magnus jumps in to silence Abigail when she expresses her heretical belief in the River beyond, and Harrow herself scoffs that "it has been thousands of years since anybody bothered to believe in the River beyond." Abigail believes that John knows nothing about what exists beyond the River. And what about Hell? In HTN, Ulysses the First is described as "languishing in Hell" after his run-in with a Resurrection Beast. John himself describes the stoma as "the mouth to Hell", "a portal to a place I cannot touch - somewhere I don't fully comprehend, where my power and my authority are utterly meaningless."
In the Book of Revelation - the Bible's account of the end of the world - Jesus holds "the keys of death and Hell". John may have resurrected the dead, but he does not comprehend what is beyond it. Both the destination of the good, the River beyond to which the souls of little Isaac and Jean should have traveled lightly after their short and brutal lives, and the Hell that lies beneath the stoma are outside of his power. He is a few keys short of the full divine bunch. He can manipulate death, but he is not really its master.
And so Harrow walks off into the River to look for something or someone she can call god. Harrow, who shares a name with the defeat of death across time and space. Harrow, who is of the unbroken line of Anastasia. Anastasia was kind to Alecto, who like Eve is the mother of all and like Adam walked on the empty earth with god.
In Orthodox icons, the Harrowing of Hell is depicted with Jesus triumphant, leading Adam and Eve by the hand from their tombs. The traditional term for this image is an anastasis, the Greek term for resurrection. Adam and Eve, whose sin broke the intended shape of reality, are restored to wholeness with god.
How will Harrow answer her questions about god? What really is beyond the stoma and what would it mean to conquer it? What does it look like, metaphysically, to restore the world of The Locked Tomb to wholeness, and what will it cost?
— Ursula K. Le Guin, from “A Rant About ‘Technology’”
Ursula K. Le Guin on the presence of technology in her work
The whole piece is short and worth a read.
Wei Wuxian teaching the children :P
I am about going to gripe about something that's been really annoying me lately.
First let me start with a disclaimer that I am speaking generally here. Of course both the U.S. and Europe are both massive and diverse places containing hundreds of millions of people, and a lot of regional differences. Neither the U.S. or Europe are a monolith (although a lot of people on the internet speak of both places as a monolith, which I wish people would stop doing, since neither are).
I could be wrong about this, since I don't live in the U.S., and haven't visited everywhere in Europe. But between where I have visited in the U.S., and where I have visited / lived in Europe, and from what I know from my friends in the U.S. and friends in other European countries, I get the feeling that overall the U.S. has stricter disability access laws than a lot of places in Europe do, especially in regard to building codes.
Of course there are exceptions, I know New York city is abhorrently hostile in its design towards anyone elderly and/or disabled. Although when I visited New York city it really just felt on par with a lot of major European cities with how abhorrently inaccessible it was.
One example of this is that recently I saw a Reddit discussion where a USAmerican vacationing in France was surprised at how many staircases didn't have handrails, because according to this man handrails are required by law in the U.S.
The comments were all Europeans having an absolute field day with this. Pretty much all of the comments were some variation of "I can't believe Americans are too stupid and lazy to use the stairs without a handrail 🤣🤣🤣 what's wrong with you fat lazy stupid Americans that you can't even use stairs without a handrail 🤣🤣🤣 thank GOD I was born in Europe where I was just taught how to walk up and down the stairs on my own and don't need a handrail like a lazy fat stupid American 🤣🤣🤣"
A few people tried to gently point out that this was about accessibility for elderly and disabled people, and it's not cool to laugh at building codes that are about accessibility, but those commenters were usually shut down with some variation of "yeah well in MY European country if someone is disabled or becomes elderly we either move to a more accessible building or we modify our home to be more accessible, we don't sit around whining like a bunch of Americans that our building isn't already accessible 🙄"
Which is, such a cruel way to talk about accessibility. Why wouldn't disabled and elderly people deserve the same access to a building as anyone else? Are elderly and disabled people not allowed to visit friends and family? Anyone could get hit by a car today, and after that struggle with going up and down stairs without the use of a handrail for the next several months, years, possibly the rest of your life. It's so easy to feel smug when you can easily trot up and down the stairs without a handrail, but so cruel to be unwilling to consider anyone who struggles with stairs should maybe be allowed access to the same places as you.
Honestly when I go on vacation abroad with my elderly + disabled mother, it's often easier to go to the U.S. with her than other places in Europe, because the U.S. does tend to be more accessible (in my experience, and except for New York city ofc) making going around to different public places with my mom generally a lot easier than somewhere like France or the Netherlands.
Out of all the things you could clown on the U.S. about, why you gotta go for accessibility of all things? It's disgustingly ableist and ageist, and I have to wonder if these people actually just hate disabled people / accessible design, and are using the U.S. as an excuse to hate on disabled people and accessible design.
I’m a Canadian. Our disability access is probably better than much of Europe (although I haven’t visited a lot of different European countries). But it’s definitely worse than the USA.
The USA has something called the Americans With Disabilites Act (ADA), and apparently it works fairly well. An American in my WhatsApp group went to a figure skating championship in Toronto a while back and was stunned that the arena didn’t have wheelchair access for spectators. Because an American arena would have.
Not everything about the USA is awful. Not everything about Canada and Europe is great.
Also, I live in Vancouver. We didn’t have a subway system until 1986, that’s when the Skytrain was finally built. Several of the Skytrain stations were originally built with no elevators. People with wheelchairs were expected to enter or exit the system at a different station that did have wheelchair access. In 1986.
The system wasn’t built in 1896 or 1926, when wheelchairs were a newfangled idea. It was built in 1986. British Columbian Rick Hansen’s Man In Motion world wheelchair tour started in 1985 (in Vancouver).
Or well, the Skytrain was opened in 1986. Let’s say the plans for it were finalized by 1983, since it would’ve taken a few years to build. In 1983, there was already a substantial disability rights movement in Canada, but several Skytrain stations didn’t have elevators anyway, presumably because it was cheaper.
Naturally, it eventually became politically unacceptable to make wheelchair users (and people with strollers, and people with canes or walkers, and people with suitcases) skip a station because they hadn’t bothered to put an elevator in that station.
So those stations had to be retrofitted at vast expense to make them wheelchair-accessible. It probably would’ve been cheaper to just build them accessible from the start, in retrospect. But we didn’t have a Made In Canada version of the ADA, so it didn’t happen.
Also, wheelchair accessibility does not only help wheelchair users. It also helps people with babies or toddlers in strollers, people using walkers, crutches, or canes, travellers with heavy suitcases, elderly people, etc, etc. I take the Skytrain several days a week, and I see all those people taking the elevator instead of the stairs or escalators.
Rick Hansen - Wikipedia
You know I'm really not used to being grateful to live in the US especially now but uh. Huh. Jesus fucking christ.
Also, bluntly, clowning on the USA for having comparatively good disability rights is spitting in the face of all of the disabled activists who made that happen. The USA didn’t just wake up with the ADA one day, and we sure as fuck didn’t just up and decide to enact it become so many of our non-disabled citizens were lazy and fat.
The fight for the ADA was long, and bitter, and every single line of it is thanks to decades tireless activism work. Evangelical religious groups widely opposed the ADA because they believed that disability (and especially particularly disabling conditions, such as being HIV+) was God’s will, and wanted disabled people to be reliant on (religious) charity. Most large corporations and business interest groups opposed the ADA, because complying with accessibility requirements might hurt their bottom line. The US Chamber of Commerce came out swinging against it. The National Federation of Independent Business called it "a disaster for small business" and fear-mongered about it shutting down mom & pop shops and throwing hard-working American out of work. Greyhound Bus Lines literally testified before Congress that they were ~so concerned~ about the costs of requiring disability accommodations that they believed that passing the ADA would be tantamount to denying all rural people access to any buses, because apparently having to install a few fold-out ramps and fold-up seats would instantly bankrupt every extant bus company.
The bill was trapped in limbo for months. It looked hopeless. A lot of people thought it couldn’t happen – that the lobbies against disability rights and the disabled were simply too strong.
And in response, hundreds of disabled protesters showed up in Washington, DC and crawled up the steps of the Capitol.
Meet the protesters who crawled their way into history—and changed how all Americans live.
How dare anyone call the USA “lazy” for our disability rights laws. We had second graders with cerebral palsy drag themselves up 100 stone steps in order to win those rights. Get the word out “lazy” out of your fucking mouthes.
Most of the pictures I have seen of the Capitol Crawl Protest are in black and white, which is bizarre because it happened in 1990. Here's a couple pics in full colour.
Beverly Engel, Healing Your Emotional Self
murderbot judging the upholstery every time it enters a room:
paired with their often intimate and violent subject matter, i find the incidental way tamsyn muir frames women and their bodies throughout the locked tomb series to be refreshing bordering on radical
consider harrowhark; in the first book we see her as gideon sees her. she's a hideous ghoul with a flat ass and no tits, she's a delicate sopping wet beauty with a sharp face and angel bow lips, she's a triumphant and awe inspiring master necromancer screaming and fighting drenched in her own blood. the shape and condition of her body is allowed to take on meaning contextually based entirely on the situation and how gideon feels about their relationship in any given moment
she then spends the second book hobbling around with a sword twice her size, ripping apart her body to use as a weapon and passing out in her own vomit, struggling to eat and sleep – she and puts herself through absolute hell and never once thinks anything of it, and we're made to mourn this not as the desecration of a beautiful woman but as a manifestation of a human being's despair and self loathing, and we see this specifically contrasted against the care gideon tries to take when inhabiting her body during the last act
it's jarring, in nona, when we're suddenly made aware that her body could be perceived or valued as a commodity, when pyrrha is assumed to be nona's pimp. it feels strange and horrifying when we learn alecto's form was modeled for a doll, learn that she was given a woman's body as a display of ownership, an alternative to being consumed, and as we're processing this we watch gideon, paul, and ianthe, immediately setting aside their conflict in a desperate scramble to preserve harrow's body for no reason other than because it is harrow's and they love her
feminist fiction often focuses on women's relationship to a body which is valued more than the person within it – and that is a worthy experience to explore – but as a transsexual butch(ish) dyke, i have never really had the privilege of seeing my body as a precious commodity, never felt like it couldn't or shouldn't be a sight of violence and disgust, and as a result the locked tomb books have made me feel seen in a way that few other works of fiction have?
we as an audience are not made aware of how attractive any character would be outside of the context of our lesbian POV characters' perspectives, their relationship to patriarchal beauty standards is an utterly irrelevant detail we're never told and only occasionally glimpse through implication. the women in the locked tomb books are simply free to exist, to have experiences and feelings, to love and hate and grieve and suffer and die like anybody else, and to have those experiences reflected in their physical vessels
it's a perspective that's so fundamental and obvious that to praise muir for it for it feels almost patronizing, but i also think it's a huge part of what's made the series so resonant for so many queer women and i feel that that's worthy of highlighting and celebrating
yeah yeah having a crush is embarassing but have you ever watched yourself develop a new category 5 character obsession in real time. agonizingly humiliating shit
Biodiversity can be achieved through executive dysfunction!
