kintsukuroi

helle; queer, she or they is fine. 30's, 18+. mostly cdramas, science, and goofy shit. header from a post by agendratum.

[wolfythewitch]

Three’s a crowd!

[art-is-art-is-art]

In the House, Sergei Vinogradov

[its-funnytwittertweets]

[ginny-lala]

[ortiies]

One can easily get lost when there’s no phone coverage

[zmpl]

Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight? by Nicole Nikolich (2025)

[odyartlec]

let sleeping gods lie 😴

[c86]

Girl At The May Day Parade, Lviv, 1968

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

I just need a beautiful woman to tell me that my bizarre imitation of human social skills is alluring and sexy

[kleinergeist]

After 9 months of work, my Oseberg tapestry sweater is complete!

This was my first sweater knitted in the round, first stranded colourwork project, and my first time steeking. It was definitely my most challenging project so far, and a lot of learning and research was involved. I used a colourwork chart created by the very talented Molly Gifford, which is available for free on Ravelry

For reference, this is one of the fragments uncovered from the gravesite:

Some scholars think that the Oseberg tapestry includes the earliest known artistic depiction of Odin's ravens, Huginn and Muninn. So I added them to the sleeves as a little Easter egg.

[twilightarcade]

looper

[brarchives]

jaguars in manaus, amazonas, brasil, photographed by caio vieira

[power-chords]

Can you please explain your dialogue theory of fanfiction?

In short, that dialogue, more than anything, makes or breaks a fanfic. What do posts like "He would not fucking say that" and "They would NOT have communication skills that good" have in common? Talk. Characters expressing themselves to one another. The faithful recreation of identifiable speech patterns is weighted heavily in the evaluation of a fic's quality. By "speech patterns" I do not just mean the semantic content of a given character's expression, but idiosyncrasies of style and slang, vocabulary and idiom, even gesture, musicality, and rhythm.

Of course believable dialogue is far from the only thing that makes a good fanfic Good. And there are forms of fic writing, particularly highly abbreviated ones like drabbles and ficlets, that in practice tend to de-emphasize its significance. But if we are talking about the romantic, erotic shippy stuff that is the meat and potatoes of online fandom, dialogue does the heaviest lifting short of the consummation itself. Arguably more so! It's the real keystone to the catharsis, and often the catalyst for it. Is there a confession occurring? A provocation? An evasion or ultimatum? Zoom out, big picture: What is the most potent and fundamental mechanic for developing complexity, tension, and transformation within a relationship, getting it to go from one thing to another? Making these two idiots talk to each other! Often clumsily and indirectly and maladaptively, at the worst possible time and in the worst possible situation, about anything or everything but what they should be — but talk they usually do.

What makes fanfic specifically so challenging and rewarding in this regard is that the talking is as much a feat of translation as invention, because both reader and writer are working off an existing model. Liberties taken with plot, form, and even narrative voice have wider buffer zones; you can get creative with circumventing the events of canon while still conforming to its emotional and substantive essence.

But the training wheels come off the moment you open your mouth to speak in another character's voice. And man, nothing will break a reader's immersion quite like he would not fucking say that.

[mikkeneko]

Not gonna lie this was why getting into writing fanfic for cdrama fandoms was such a big jump for me. Had to internalize an entirely new codebase, so to speak, on how characters talk (with an added frustration of knowing I'm at least two or three jumps removed from the actual source dialogue)

[wharfkiss]

temporary binder reminder, thank you yumi sakugawa

[cityelf]

this poem is about being nonbinary.

[stunflsk]

the issue with this poem is that nonbinary people are harmless whereas werewolves traditionally mangle and kill people. I don’t think the right analogy has been used here

[cityelf]

First off, you are allowed to have an opinion about poetry, but I'm going to point out what you appear to have missed. Secondly, I am nonbinary and this is my poem. I wrote it to represent how it sometimes feels being nonbinary in a hostile environment. I don't appreciate being told there's an issue with how things resonate with me or the others who have shared this post. In future, I would recommend you be kinder in your phrasing.

The werewolf has not harmed anyone. The werewolf's apparent only crime is living in the town. There is no evidence or past experience that any werewolves - or the men and wolves in the town - have ever actually hurt anyone. No mangling or killing, and no intention to do so. He just lives there, and apparently has for some time without issue. The townsperson who has approached the speaker refuses to admit this in as many words, but that is literally the text. If there was evidence of harm, it would have been provided when the speaker asked, "has he actually done anything wrong?"

I am a trans person living in the UK. The media and transphobes treat trans people of all kinds like they are predators ready to mutilate and defile children as though there is any evidence of it, when in fact there is absolutely none. And a significant portion of the public, who perhaps don't consider themselves to be transphobic - or at least, would never admit it - believe what they are being told. That is the analogy.

The werewolf isn't the issue here.

[clevermanka]

Multi-generational vulture nests hold 700 years of human artifacts

Crossbow bolts, sandals, slingshots, and more.

Among the centuries’ worth of eggshells, prey remains, and natural nesting material, researchers identified 226 objects that were either made or altered by humans. These included weaponry like a crossbow bolt and wooden lance, decorated sheep leather, and parts of a slingshot.  Using carbon dating, the team determined that the items also had a huge age range. For example, a shoe made from twigs and grass is around 675-years-old, while a basket is estimated to have been woven about 150 years ago. Beyond the manufactured relics of our species’ past, archaeologists also catalogued 2,117 bones, 86 hooves, and 43 eggshells. They even located 11 hair remains among the nesting layers. More analysis will provide a look into the surrounding area’s past environment, as well as its various flora and fauna.

[batbcomic]

Lately I've been pondering the development of Beauty and Beast's relationship, chiefly in Villeneuve/Beaumont's and Disney's versions, and of course you're own; each retelling is unique in its own way, and each has different lessons to teach. My question to you is, how has this relationship developed over the centuries (i.e. how we interpret it), and who do you think learns more from the other, or has more character growth, due to this relationship: Beauty or Beast?

Ooh, that’s a GREAT question, and not one I can really give a short or glib answer to…

Most older variants of the story are interested in Beauty getting what she deserves —wealth, station and an appropriate mate. This makes sense, as it’s a story about a woman told by women —first at great length in Villeneuve’s novella, and then in a much shorter bowdlerized form by Beaumont. The primary concern of the story is Beauty being respectfully courted by a remarkable patient and good hearted, but ugly, individual. This is, heartbreakingly, a deeply romantic fantasy when we consider that its authors were women who had been foisted into loveless political marriages with less than kindhearted men — it’s the story of hoping the man with whom you are forced co-habitate will turn out to be a kind prince, in spite of first seeming to be an unknowable monster.

The details of the characters aren’t precise —these are fairy tales after all. The Prince has no name, and neither does the heroine (she is so pretty people call her a beauty — this isn’t actually her name). Villeneuve glories in setting her stage and painting her set details, but never gives us much idea of the characters’ emotional lives. Beaumont trims the fat (and the backstory) but leaves us with even less to build upon. All we really know is the Beauty is kind, optimistic, hard-working and good, and her Beast is patient, self-effacing and perhaps a touch melodramatic.

It’s when we begin moving into cinema and the modern trend towards broader retellings that we start to see some digging into the character’s emotional state;

Cocteau’s film gives us a remarkable sensual Beast, and a stern, restrained Beauty. The story, abstract in places, relying on metaphor and surrealist imagery, can be taken as an emotional one — Beauty’s strange journey towards realizing her own sensual desires, as depicted by a man who seems to be an animal… or is he her brother’s friend? She’s not sure. They run together in her mind. Although Cocteau’s Beast is a powerful image with his smoking claws, his diamond tears, and his stalking bloodied through Beauty’s bedchamber, the emotional journey is not his.

Robin Mckinley gave us our next step in her fully realized novel, Beauty — a straightforward and no- nonsense story told from the heroine’s straightforward and no-nonsense point of view. Here, Beauty’s interior life is on full display. It is most definitely her story, her growth, and her revelations we care about. Her Beast is already more or less a complete person — one who is happy to rediscover his love of horses, yes, but not with any great emotional journey to make. Once more, it is Beauty who must grapple with herself, while the Beast waits patiently for her to come him as the inevitable conclusion.

When Disney arrives (borrowing much of McKinley’s Beauty for their own bookish, horse-loving Belle) they begin an exploration we haven’t seen before —one into the Beast’s interior life. Gone is the gentle patient soul waiting for the girl to open up to him. Here, suddenly is the angry young man raging against circumstances and lashing out at the world. For the first time, we have a Beast who is every bit as beastly as he appears. For the first time, we have a Beauty who is awaiting the maturation her partner, her own journey already complete.

Leading up to this point, we’d seen a number of explorations of the story that allowed the Beast to become a metaphor for Beauty’s awakening sexuality, her exploration of unconscious desire, or her self actualization. We hadn’t seen a Beast who was a person in and of himself since Beaumont trimmed away Villeneuve’s backstory of a boy cursed by a caregiver-turned-predator.

Since then, we’ve seen a number of adaptations concerned with the Beast’s journey back to humanity — Donna Jo Napoli’s “Beast”,  Alex Flinn’s “Beastly” , and Disney’s Broadway adaptation of the animated film among others. Rare is the appearance of the patient and polite monster suitor we originally knew. The Beast has become a masculine metaphor for self-loathing, for fear of one’s desires and impulses, and for the conquering of one’s aggression. His winning of love and subsequent return to shining humanity is a promise that even the most unlovable of us can grow and change and be redeemed. It is an interesting cultural shift, that this once very female-centred story is now often one of masculine growth and change.

So, in trying to sum up, traditionally Beauty and the Beast has been a story about a young woman’s journey to accepting an unconventional male partner. In the twentieth century, it become a popular metaphor for the awakening of female sexuality and power. Now, more and more, we see it as a metaphor for the channeling of negative masculinity into positive masculinity. The story evolves. We pull new meaning from it, stretch it this way and that, examine it in the mirror, and take it apart to see how it ticks. It changes to suit our cultural needs, and it will continue to change.

In my own work, I’m trying to move a step further — to write a story about equals. Two people growing in complimentary ways, rather than one partner awaiting the other. We will always have our separate initiation rites, but for now I’m interested in seeing how a relationship blossoms. A particular quote has stayed with me through the development of the comic adaptation of Beauty and the Beast and it is this:

“A generation ago, great writers and editors like Jane Yolen, Ellen Datlow… reclaimed the traditional heritage: dismissing soft-focus, Disneyfied Snow White and Cinderella, rediscovering grim truths and quick-witted, resourceful heroines. That’s fine, that’s excellent work. But what I’ve wanted to do is to reclaim the relationships. To bring the prince and the princess together, instead of sending them off on segregated initiation trials. To let them meet as human beings, as friends, and fight side by side.”

—Gwyneth Jones”

[markscherz]

please post the naked geckos

Back in 2017, @leotide posted this incredible piece, which is easily one of my favourite scientific illustrations of all time.

An actual photo of a skinless Geckolepis (here a never-before-posted photo of a G. cf. maculata, not G. megalepis) is below the cut. There is no blood or gore, but I could see how this would make some uncomfortable, so I have hidden it.

I have examined dozens of museum specimens of these geckos, and I haven't found a single one that appeared never to have lost at least some part of its skin or tail and regrown them. So, although it seems extreme, this is something these geckos do readily, and are specially adapted to do. Remarkably, they seem to be able to make a full recovery, even when a huge portion of the skin is lost in this way. They seek shelter in a humid spot, and let the skin regrow—a process that apparently only takes a matter of weeks. And yes, it's the whole dermis, not just the scales. This makes my work as a taxonomist very hard, because counting scales is one of the most reliable ways to tell lizard species apart.

The readiness with which these geckos lose their scales means that a careless capture can quickly result in an animal that looks like the one pictured above. Many museum specimens look like this one—impossible to count scales on. It is for this reason that I have developed special techniques to work with these geckos. It honestly shocks me that they are in the pet trade; you could not ask for a more fragile reptile pet!