Day in the life of a blacksmith 😎
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@feanorinleatherpants
Day in the life of a blacksmith 😎
No, no, and NO.
AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.
AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”
Owning the servers is a core tenet of OTW/AO3.
Warming up a new database server….
When people involved with AO3 talk about “the cost of servers” they don’t mean “the cost to pay Amazon for space on their servers.” They mean, like, the cost to physically own them, and eventually replace them with new ones. And the operating costs to run them.
AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.
While this is not a solution that can work for everyone who wants to deal with controversial content, it is why AO3ple sneer at alt-righters who complain about getting thrown off hosting platforms.
I Want Us to Own the Goddamned Servers
Because I want us to own the goddamned servers, ok? Because I want a place where we can’t be TOSed and where no one can turn the lights off or try to dictate to us what kind of stories we can tell each other.
AO3 is what a website looks like when you seize the means of production.
ohhh man. apparently when you copy+paste stuff directly from claude into ao3 it includes code. which anyone can find. people have found it in big, popular fics in multiple fandoms 😬. also heated rivalry; some of which the authors fervently denied using AI. link to thread.
link to their complete findings for those without twitter
I love some good fan research
SOURCE
I SAW THIS & IMMEDIATELY THOUGHT OF @shrimp-bird
I am so out of practice in terms of posting my drawings (and you know, brains, the world..) BUT LOOK AT THESE PENGUIN STICKERS I MADE
Happy Pride month!
I'm gay
I'm an ally
I'm the cupid of things that you just didn't get
I'm the saint of the paint that was left in the pot
I'm your angel ellipsis (your devil of dots)
I'm the heartache that aches far too much to be shunned
I'm the captain of courage that you've eternally lacked
I'm the Jesus of wishing to Christ he'll come back
I'm the face that stares back when the screen goes to black
I'm the tales that the guest will applaud and believe
I'm the child that you just didn't have time to conceive
Other/nuanced/I am time itself (I slow to let you play)
Behold my circle.
My Fitness Coach is a Dark Wizard [Complete]
Here's the audio of Gold btw, with the chatter and applause trimmed out 👍 From this video uploaded to YouTube after the gig, which I have been watching on repeat. I'm gonna be so normal when the album drops.
Kickstarter awarded this campaign a "Project we love" badge and I am truly speechless -- and that's on top of 800+ backers and $64,000 raised -- 600% of the funding goal!! If you're a fan of fantasy novels, the Roman empire, MESSSSSSSSY DRAMAAAAAA, and academic footnotes that explain to you all the details of the hottest goss from 2000 years ago, check out this book!!!
A new fantasy novel by Alexandra Rowland, author of A TASTE OF GOLD AND IRON, RUNNING CLOSE TO THE WIND, & YIELD UNDER GREAT PERSUASION
Who else up thinking about bjj black belt craig jones saying You can give anyone steroids. Despite our best efforts we are yet to give anyone autism.
i think it's really fun when a rly specific trope is super popular in one particular medium but in other ones it's just totally unheard of. it's the time knife. visual novel players are suuuuper used to death games but many others encountered them for the first time in squid games. the other day my mom showed me all excited the summary of a super original novel she found and it was about a girl who got reincarnated as the main character in her favorite fantasy book
what the fuck is a time knife
Time knife is a form of time knife
i need everyone to let me lay my head in their lap while they pet my hair and make soothing noises and tell me i'm doing such a good and brave job marketing this book. fuckin sisyphean indignity of hurling it at instagram over and over and getting basically no traction whwkwhfwlfwhjsklgfwhjkl
meanwhile my BELOVED FELLOW TUMBLRINI are being so INCREDIBLY kind and generous with the signal boosting and the general interest and encouragement, i am so grateful
#wait wait wait wait wait hold the fuck up#i was like ‘omg ariaste?? like ariaste from ao3?? like ariaste author of some of my favorite mdzs fics ever????’#‘they have a tumblr?! (how did this not occur to me before lol)’#and then ‘omg ariaste has a BOOK i must read it immediately’#then i go to their tumblr and am SLAPPED IN THE FACE by the fact that ariaste and alexandra rowland are the same person#like. ‘yield under great persuasian’ alexandra rowland.#you’re telling me tam beckett and attempting the impossible au!jiang cheng are written by the same person???? mind. blown.#*becket#this is like when i found out naomi novik was astolat all over again#sorry op you probably have this happen to you all the time it’s just my little mind is struggling to absorb this into rn lol (via @jcbmcdrmtt) it has only happened to me a handful of times (i am not nearly as famous and cool as @astolat) but it IS delightful fun to harmlessly jumpscare people in this way, i must admit.
extra funny in this case because i believe my AO3 username was listed in the bio at the back of Yield Under Great Persuasion lmaooooo
anyway hi hello yes it is me. a gremlin making questionable choices about doing a kickstarter and now i have played myself with having to do all this promo
#to my deep shame for like 15 seconds I thought that the Fantasy Romans post was a colloquial misspelling of “Fantasy Romance”#And then I was like oh thank god like ROME ROMANS (via @peri-hellion) No no wait this is hilarious this is so good, this is a brilliant joke and you should not be ashamed of it. "Local romantasy author Alexandra Rowland has written a new romantasy novel" and then the camera pans to me and i'm standing there vibrating with excitement, my hands full of Ancient Roman Trivia And All The Best Bits of HOT GOSS AND EVEN HOTTER TAKES From Classical Antiquity, and the interviewer is like "uhhhhhh i thought this was.... a romance???? novel???? romantasy? romance fantsy?" and i'm like "oh. no. no it's very much not a romance novel this is a ROMANS novel it's about the romans, Roman Fantasy, haha yes can i tell you about the romans???? nevermind i've actually already locked all the doors and windows ANYWAY SO THE FIRST THING YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND IS THAT THE ROMANS DIDN'T ACTUALLY HAVE A GENDER BINARY AND YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND DEEPLY AND *WITH SPECIFICITY* WHAT A 'VIR' IS--" and the interview is crying and shaking while i just hand them trivia tchotchke after trivia tchotchke and unload my pockets into their arms
DONT JUST TEASE US ABOUT THE LACK OF ROMAN GENDER BINARY GIVE US THE GOODS!
oh my god okay so. For one thing. They straight up have words for intersex people. If a word exists, the concept exists. So already they're aware that sometimes bodies aren't easily categorized, so anyone who says "but the romans definitely did have a sex/gender binary" is just self-evidently wrong from the get-go.
They also straight up have words and social roles for people we'd now probably classify under the transfeminine umbrella, the galli. These were AMAB people who voluntarily underwent castration, dressed in women's clothes/jewelry/makeup, and were priests and worshippers of a particular religious cult to the goddess Cybele/Magna Mater, and Attis, her consort. (There is a character in the book who is a gallus! She is the emperor's augur, meaning she makes divinations based on observing the flight of birds. Important person to bring along on a quest.) Here is a statue of a gallus looking extremely cool:
But all of that is sort of.... normal to us? Like we get it, we understand that, we go "Oh, yeah, it's like this other idea we already know about," it fits into our mental model, it does not challenge us to bend our brains in any weird yoga poses.
"Vir" is the thing that will do that. "Vir" is often translated as just "man" but this is bad and lacks the weight of certain encoded subtleties. It is one of two words that means man, the other being "homo" (as in homo sapiens), but the vibes of that one are more generally just "a person (nonspecific)". "Vir", however, has extremely specific vibes, because it is not just "a man" as we would think of the concept today. A vir MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST possess ALL of the following traits to qualify as a vir:
adult
freeborn
male-bodied
CITIZEN!!!!!!!
with intact genitals
(behaves correctly as a vir)
If he's a teenage freeborn AMAB citizen, he's not a vir (yet). If he's an adult freeborn transmasculine citizen, he's not a vir. If he's a slave or a freedman or an immigrant (aka Not A Citizen), he's not a vir. If he used to be a vir and then got castrated (either by misadventure or as punishment for a crime), then oops he's not a vir anymore, he's a semivir (half-man). If he is a vir but he doesn't act reputably and adhere to the Required Gender Norms, then he's on THIN FUCKING ICE and should stop immediately and get his act together before his paterfamilias disowns him for Betraying The Vir Code.
From the word "vir" we get words like "virtue" (aka the qualities a vir should have), and "virile" (a vir's ability to be Fucking). This is also where we get words like "triumvirate" (a governing body comprised of three viri) -- which, when you realize what "vir" implies, REALLY showcases how unequivocally other genders were excluded from being full participants in government. Couldn't be elected to public office unless you were a vir!
The thing that makes this incredibly *GENDER* is that there were mandatory anxious toxic masculinity expectations forced on the viri that other AMAB people did not have to comply with. The Romans were out here conceptualizing gender as being something that was as much informed by your SOCIAL CLASS as it was by physical sex. So a male slave, freedman, or foreigner could (for example) refrain from shaving his armpits, and it doesn't really matter. Meanwhile, if you are a vir, you DO have to shave at least your armpits to be behaving Properly. JUST ARMPITS. If you shave your legs or your chest or your pubes, then [middle school voice] EW that's Gay. (The Romans' concept of vir-masculinity was very much a VERY FRAUGHT AND TENUOUS AND ANXIOUS attempt to find a Goldilocks zone in the midst of constantly shifting goalposts. If you're not manly enough, obviously that's gay and bad, we still have this concept today. BUT IF YOU ARE TOO MANLY THAT IS ALSO GAY AND BAD. Gladiators??? A super shredded mega-hot gladiator who's drowning in pussy? The viri are like, "Gay. Gay of him. Unmanly. Effeminate. Ew yuckie no no no." We do not have an upper limit on "how much masculinity is good" in our culture, we sort of think "the more the better" and that's why everyone's horny for a lumberjack.)
A lot of the time people are like "The Romans didn't have homophobia! They only had bottomphobia :D" but actually they DO have homophobia once you account for the fact that "vir" is a separate gender from "servus" (male slave), "libertus" (male freedman), or "peregrinus" (male foreigner/immigrant/other non-citizen), etc. A vir can fuck any of those genders, AND any of the AFAB-aligned genders, AND the galli, AND intersex people and that is perfectly fine and normal and Roman Heterosexual of him. Why is it fine? Because the default cultural assumption is that the vir will be topping. A vir absolutely must top, viri who do not top get mocked and made laughingstocks in satirical plays. This is catastrophic to them. They would genuinely prefer to die in battle, even though it's kind of gay to get stabbed when you think about it because that's basically another man penetrating you????? Cringe. Cringe and effeminate to be stabbed.
Actual Roman homosexuality would be a vir fucking another vir--someone of his own gender. This absolutely cannot happen, because then [GASP] ONE OF THEM WOULD HAVE TO NOT TOP. Morality crisis. Philosophers throughout the empire are clutching their pearls and scribbling the ancient equivalent of Reddit posts about how one time they heard about a guy (vir) who fucked his friend (another vir) and it's Probably Because Of Moral Bankruptcy Such As This That Society Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes, We Live In The End Times If Viri Think It's Okay To Kiss Each Other With Tongue, The Only Thing Morally Worse Than This Is How All the Twinks Are Becoming Gold-diggers (we can't get into the twink golddiggers panic of the 2nd century right now. it's about the viri buying twink boytoy sex slaves and then leaving them their entire vast fortunes in their wills when they died. Seneca the Younger had a Reddit tantrum about it)
basically the Romans did not INVENT toxic masculinity but they did perfect it and raise it to an art form. absolute slapstick comedy clown shit. Don't kiss your wife in public, that's gay. Don't fuck too much. Don't fuck too little. Don't fuck other men's wives. Don't chase pussy. Don't be too fashionable, don't be too unfashionable, don't belt your toga too tightly, don't scratch your nose in public, DEFINITELY do not be an actor, do not play music or dance in public. You can be an orator but that's still a bit sus tbh, because it's LIKE performing in public like an actor, and that's BASICALLY the same as prostituting yourself. Don't comb your hair too much. don't comb your hair too little. Don't be unkempt. Don't be too well-groomed.
[holds up the viri proudly like a naughty cat, stinky bastard man] they are making themselves miserable every day of their lives and that's one of my favorite things to watch a man do <3333 read my book. look at it on kickstarter
this is sincerely only scraping the surface of Roman gender nonsense and how absolutely fucked up these guys were. And i CANNOT get into stuff like how manumission (an enslaved person being voluntarily given freedom) was treated with rituals and attitudes that kinda make it feel like a gender transition process (you get new social roles, you get new expectations, you are washed clean of any "necessary shame" you might have had to endure, a sharp line is drawn between your old life and your new life). I also can't get into the Twink Genders right now or this will be impossibly long (twink is a roman gender, and there are multiple sub-genders under the twink gender umbrella ("puer" "exoletus" "pathicus/cinaedus" etc))
and you thought having a lot of genders was a new modern thing. no no. lol. lmao even. go read Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, it will give you SO many more cool facts about these fucked up lil guys if you don't want to wait for my book (though the author, a presumably cis man writing in i believe 1994 doesn't have the "ohhhh wait this is GENDER, this is ALL GENDER, this is just GENDERS ALL THE WAY DOWN" epiphany that i, a nonbinary person on tumblr in 2026, am predisposed to perceive)
people should also ask me about the Latin Fuck Verbs sometime.
I was gonna reblog this without commentary but now I want to hear about the Latin Fuck Verbs again.
I have explained about the Latin Fuck Verbs in a second post now 🫡https://www.tumblr.com/ariaste/814238044071854080/please-explain-the-latin-fuck-words-for-science?source=share
Okay I have to ask.
Vir.
Is this.
Is this related to "virus"?
NOPE but good thought and I had the exact same curiosity a while ago when I was writing the book. From Wiktionary, Virus is: "via rhotacism from Proto-Italic *weizos, from Proto-Indo-European *wisós (“fluidity, slime, poison”)." whereas vir is "from Proto-Italic *wiros, from Proto-Indo-European *wiHrós." I have also JUST discovered that the prefix "were-" (as in "werewolf") is etymologically related, so that's fun and cool :D
And before you ask, "virgin" is unclear etymology (according to Wiktionary)
What is the book and where can I get my excited little paws on it???
If Emily is Brennan’s nemesis, an equal opponent he respects even as she endeavours to destroy him, and Ally is his supervillain, a chaotic and malevolent force within the established reality and confines of D20, then Katie is an eldritch horror so far beyond his comprehension, a being of pure, unpredictable and unknowable evil from outside reality, engendering utter madness as a perfectly reasonable response to encountering her.
Pokopia is my latest obsession 😍🎮 I’m playing through very slowly and haven’t finished the story yet, but it’s already shaping up to be one of my favourite games! Such a perfect spin off from the series.
These two are so cute! I just had to draw them both in the cosy moss cave 🍄