things

23 || occasional nsfw reblogs, otherwise just an amalgamation of things i see on this webbed site

[salamispots]

wobbly cat wip; cat body is made from yarn I spun :'D

[polarity-disturbed]

Being able to draw older people as attractive without reducing or erasing the visual signs of aging, and in fact showing that they're attractive because of those signs, is an artistic skill that should be valued so much more. Honestly, it should earn you an immediate fortune because holy fuck is it a rare commodity. There are so many artists who seem to think attractiveness and aging exist in opposition to each other, so they smooth every wrinkle, erase every crease, and de-age the character until they're basically thirty with silver hair. But when an artist can look at crow's feet, smile lines, weathered skin, deep-set wrinkles, and all the little traces of a life well lived and say, "No, that's what makes them beautiful," that's a level of artistic observation and care I wish we celebrated more often.

[naggingatlas]

and fat btw

[sabertoothwalrus]

and balding btw

[brittlepredatordemon]

Actually, no, I don't think that friendships dropping like flies in your late 20s and early 30s because no one has time for that between overwork and family obligations and marriage and kids and partners and the ritual of the time slayer is normal and ok. No I don't think deep conversations and spontaneous adventures being replaced with a tired coffee every six months is a normal part of growing up. I don't think that emotional intimacy and soul bonds disintegrating in the face of practical inconvenience is a fact of life. I think that means something is deeply deeply wrong with our society and I will never forgive it for the friends I've lost

[wizardarchetypes]

i know it's been said on here and said again but people do so desperately need to genuinely do intentional work to build distress tolerance and start figuring out how to recognize the differences between danger, discomfort, and when a situation that is merely uncomfortable is triggering an emotional flashback in your bodies because it resembles a past situation that actually was dangerous which makes it difficult to realize/believe that this moment is merely uncomfortable.

[wizardarchetypes]

i spoke to an allistic person who said their autistic classmate had a meltdown in class, during which the autistic classmate collapsed to the floor in the middle of the room, screaming and crying. they said it was "terrifying" and they were arguing for the autistic student to be removed permanently from the program.

when i asked whether their autistic classmate's meltdown was dangerous or merely uncomfortable, they said, "i felt like i was in danger!"

i understand that. but that's not what i asked.

[wizardarchetypes]

"i shouldn't have to experience that."

yes you should, actually. that's life. upsetting things happen. no one should have to experience any discomfort. but we do. we get stung by bees and sunburns and headaches. we live in bodies in the world.

autistic people are human beings who have the right to exist in society, including during meltdowns. having one class of your entire semester interrupted by a singular meltdown is not anymore of an infringement upon your entitlement to education than having your class interrupted by a fire alarm or cancelled for a snow storm.

one of my peers once experienced a cardiac event 10 minutes into class. it was terrifying. it was desperately upsetting. i was contacted by the school and offered counseling because i happened to be the one who managed the situation until paramedics arrived. everyone was worried about my classmate first and foremost, and then about me. no one blamed anyone, and certainly when my classmate happily recovered and returned to school, no one thought they should be removed from the program.

the difference being that people believe a disabled personal, especially with cognitive disabilities, in crisis are not experiencing something outside of our control, but instead that we are in fact making a choice to make a scene, out of malice.

[redstonedust]

may be a hot take but i think the fact minors can access 18+ content by just clicking a button that says 'yes im totally over 18 trust me' is like. totally fine tbh. its a non-issue. i dont care if curious teenagers are looking at porn. they've been doing that for as long as porn has existed. id rather teens explore their sexuality through images on the internet than rush into real life experiences when they're not ready for it yknow. the UK is trying to put stricter age verification in place (which in turn is becoming an online privacy nightmare) and like. for what. who is it helping. why is this a problem.

[bealittleimprobable]

People panic about "But what if kids pick up bad ideas from it???"

When I was a kid, Power Rangers got banned at school because we all thought it was incredibly cool and kept trying to kick each other in the head. No-one bothered explaining "Those are trained actors and it's all practiced, they don't *actually* hurt each other, and you're not good at that yet", they just banned it.

So we went to the park after school and read Kim's smuggled copy of the Power Rangers magazine and kicked each other in the head there instead.

(This is a metaphor, but it's also literally true. So much kicking in the head.)

God forbid parents actually talk to their teenagers.

[wizard-council-bureaucrat]

Things that ARE covered by your Wizard Insurance:

Top Surgery

Bottom Surgery

Witch Encounters (one per century)

Killed By Greg

Middle Surgery (✨ New! ✨)

[random-meme-bot]

[wizard-council-bureaucrat]

Oh for Gandalf's Big Naturals- Fine! 😡

Dental (✨ New! ✨) (first 1,000 teeth ONLY)

[fallenangelvictorious]

Obsessed with these tags, you are so right bestie

[xenonsreturn]

[aropride]

do you think in the 1910/1920s people were getting in trouble for joking like "we just hit the iceberg..." and "this is literally my titanic"

[goldensunset]

[gaybichon]

i think i found my new favorite artist on twitter

(source)

[gaybichon]

👆 me

[jburneko]

From an RPG perspective, I've been struggling for years to explain that "playing a character in a myth" and "treating a mythic world as if it were real" are two fundamentally different things. A part of this frustration is that I want a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the later.

[iojg]

okay alright. can you elaborate just a bit? particularly on how specific you are about the meaning of "myth", as it throws me off

[jburneko]

So, I'm sure scholars probably have a more technical definition of "myth" than I'm using. I'm primarily talking about when elements of a story are meant to be received and processed emotionally rather than logically.

For example, we might have a character that wears jade armor and sits on a throne of ruby. Now if your mind starts thinking things like what the implications are for the culture and economy of a society that uses jade for armor and ruby for furniture design then you're thinking in the wrong direction. Same if you start thinking about the actual real world properties of jade and ruby and what you could possibly make with such a large and plentiful supply of it. No. Just. Stop. Don't do that. Instead, be *emotional*. What *feelings* does such an image/character invoke you. Disgust at their opulence? Awe at their power? Respect for their commanding presence? Fear? Now have your character react *to that feeling*. What emotion do YOU want your character to reflect back. In an RPG, your character TOO is a pile of evocative aesthetics in both image and action. Do a thing that will evoke a feeling IN ME as a fellow player at the table. You can't control WHAT feeling I have, but you can do something evocative, "logic" of the situation be damned.

[iojg]

i kinda see what you are getting at, hopefully. i think it's really mostly about being impressionistic, isn't it? my mind immediately drifts to pulp fantasy, to which such "loose" imagery seems to be very important. i personally don't get much from it mostly because i'm not that great at visualizing. i could never really get into howard because of it, for example. would you say this generally applies outside of fantasy roleplaying, though?

[jburneko]

Pulp fantasy (and actual mythology) is where you see it at its boldest. But I'm not talking *purely* about visuals it can apply to "entities" whose only "logic" is their symbolic/metaphorical place in the narrative.

You see this a lot in standalone horror novels that don't get caught up in their own "lore." My absolute favorite example of this is "The Library Policeman" by Stephen King. The creature in that book and how it "works" is wholly defined by the scope of the protagonist's personal trauma. It does not "exist" nor has "logic" independent of the protagonist's emotional journey. Sure, it all makes "sense" in that story but trying to tease out the creature as an independent entity with a consequential "existence" simply falls apart.

I would also point to something like Frank Miller's Sin City stories. The characters are BOLD archetypes with no substance behind their evocative presence. Senator Rourk is a complete tautology. He is a Senator because he's rich and powerful and is rich and powerful because he is a Senator. Things happen because Rourk wants them to happen. By what means? What's the power structure propping him up? Who are his allies? Who are enemies? What is the network composing his wealth? These things are not only unanswered, I would suggest they are UNASKED. It simply doesn't matter. Rourk might as well be Zeus.

It is that element of UNASKING, I am focusing on.

This is one of the reasons film franchises begin to lose their luster because later films are often built by asking questions the earlier films not only didn't ask, but were never designed to answer. "Fandom" may be clamoring all the time for "answers" but they're always disappointed when they get them and for good reason. The questions never should have been asked in the first place.

[anim-ttrpgs]

I'm usually a huge fan of fantasy/sci-fi logistics, groundedness, biology, etc., but this is also how you get people constantly trying to "solve" vampires by saying "well they drink blood so that means they are scientifically hematophages and there is no problem with them drinking blood of any animal because other hematophages can drink the blood of any animal" and "if it's transmissible by bite that means it's a virus or bacteria that causes a mutation."

No, this was never a legend meant to operate on a 21st century biology, the blood is blood but it's also life, and so on.

Sometimes the answer isn't "it's magic" because the author hasn't thought about it, sometimes the answer is "it's magic" because the author has thought about it.

[jburneko]

Exactly. You can pick and choose. In fact, supernatural things become MORE scary when they operate spiritually when everything else operates realistically. Yup, the world works exactly the way we believe it to, oh except this *thing*. This thing is unbounded by reality. It has uncomfortable existential implications or reaches into questions that have no answers. That's scary.

[shamebats]

Imo the best type of system for children to grow up in would be one that assumes the birth parents/primary guardians won't do shit and takes care of every aspect of childcare that's essential for their wellbeing and development, collectively.

[shamebats]

But I'm just a guy who only learned how to brush his teeth properly and got glasses as a child because we had both a dentist and a doctor come to school on a regular basis. The dentist would have us all stand in a circle with our little toothbrushes and show us how to brush and correct our technique. The doctors would give us general health assessments and then have the teachers contact our patents and essentially peer pressure them into getting us any health intervention we needed. My parents only reluctantly got me glasses because they knew the teachers would judge them if they kept seeing me sit in the very front row and still squint to see the chalkboard. So I'm biased.

[shamebats]

The only times I ever remember seeing a dentist or doctor as a child was at school. I'm quite healthy physically and I'm very grateful for all the care I got from the various professionals who cared about my well-being and development more than my actual parents did.

We had free healthcare including dental, mind you, my parents just couldn't be bothered. When my brother, as a teenager, asked our mother if she could take him to his orthodontist appointments (which he'd already arranged for on his own) she basically told him she didn't feel like it and he had to take the bus.

If I could improve anything about that system, I'd take it even further and make it so kids could see a doctor and get meds, treatments, therapy, tests, disability aids etc. without having to rely on their parents as well. I shouldn't have had to put up with being bullied and guilt-tripped about the family finances and the time investment needed to take me to the optometrist every time I needed new glasses.

[shamebats]

Some parents would not take care of their children even if they were given all the time and the resources. Mine are a great example of that — my mother stopped working and became a homemaker when I was in kindergarten, my father worked from the garage and was also always home. They had a car and our village even had a bus that would come once or twice an hour that would take you to the next two bigger cities.

Did that, plus the free healthcare, translate into them actually parenting and caring for us properly? It did not. They only ever did any of that reluctantly when not doing it would make them look bad, and most of the time they did a shitty job because they could never resist the urge to boost their egos by means of bullying literal children.

So I have to wonder: what did they actually contribute to our upbringing? Like they didn't teach us shit and mostly they just endangered our mental and physical health — but hey, at least they gave me cPTSD! That took some work too.

[anarchistmemedistro]

see also family abolition, and youth liberation .

[applefae]

A knee-jerk response to neglectful parenting I see a lot is “people should have to get licenses and take rigorous tests to PROVE that they should be ALLOWED to have kids” which is eugenics. That’s just the starting line for eugenics.

We are at a point in humanity where there is no meaningful reason why we shouldn’t be structuring our societies around wellbeing for all instead of wellbeing for the “deserving”.

Assume some parents will fail. Build social infrastructure that is designed to support failed kids rather than punish would-be parents.

[queer-riot-dragon]

Parents do not have to be neglectful to fail!

They can be busy, tired, stressed about finances, ignorant, etc. They can want to do the best for their kid and Fail Anyways.

The best thing is to support the children and give them the tools they need to succeed even if the parents are already giving them those tools. Because you can never learn something too much.

[lessproblematical]

Also sometimes parents become disabled or die and family can't always be counted on, and sometimes there isn't other family

[ickaimp]

So this is not a plea for money. This is something that surprised me, and chatting with people on discord, they were unaware of as well.

Discovered last year I couldn’t look at my 2015 MacBook Air without it triggering nausea and migraines, and figured the screen died. Have been getting by on my phone, but concluded I really need a laptop again.

Saved up, realised I could afford a brand new MacBook Neo, and got one.

-And I couldn’t spend more than five minutes looking at the screen without massive eye strain, nausea, vertigo, and if I pushed it, I-need-to-lie-down-in-a-dark-room-for-hours migraines.

Looking up MacBook and Eyestrain explained what is going on. The liquid retina displays that Apple currently has uses Pulse Width Modulation or PWM. In order to give the screens a deeper depth of colour and contrast, PWM flickers between several hundred to thousand times a second.

And there is currently no way to turn it off. There are settings and apps to reduce it, but there is no way to stop the screen from flickering. Checked Apple forums, called Apple Support, and the time I could look at the screen kept shrinking. Got the laptop Tuesday, returned it Friday, today is Sunday and I’m still dealing with a vertigo migraine.

For MacBooks, it seems to vary on the computer model and the software it uses. In retrospect, the issue with my MacBook Air started after a major software update.

And it’s not just an Apple thing. Current Windows and Android screens do the same thing. There’s even a Reddit for people who are sensitive to PWM flickers to help find computers and screens that won’t trigger eyestrain and headaches.

So, yeah. This week has been a learning experience. But for those who are prone to headaches and migraines, this may be something to be aware of, cause I was not.

[heavensickness]

Being a young adult is so strange. You enter a coffee shop. The 20 year old girl waiting behind you cried all night because she just came to a new city for university and she feels so alone. That 27 year old guy over there works a job he is overqualified for, he lives with his parents and wants to move out but doesn't know what to do about it. That one 24 year old dude already has a car, a house, and a job waiting for him once he graduates thanks to his dad's connections. The 26 year old barista couldn't complete his higher education because he has to work and take care of his family. The 28 year old girl sitting next to you has no friends to go out with so she is texting her mother. That couple (both 25 years old) are married and the girl is pregnant. The 29 year old writing something on her laptop has realized that she chose the wrong major so she is trying to start all over. We are not alone in this, but we are actually so alone. Do you feel me

[maswartz]

Don't leave this in the tags.

[magnetmite]

You ever listen to somebody complaining & think "maybe if you didn't see romance &/or sex as the be-all end-all of human connection you might actually be happy"?

[maja-paja]

[todaysbird]

i really love this piece - bird window collision deterrents should absolutely be mandatory for large buildings not only in NY, but nationwide. designing architecture to not kill the world around us should be the norm.

[todaysbird]

don’t leave this in the comments!

[lamajaoscura]

If anyone is looking for ideas, Chicago Bird Collision Monitors has done decades of advocacy work in this area and fought for real improvements in saving birds. Their work on lights-out and preventing window strikes have had a big impact on the local ecosystem.