mlem

hi, im just here to look at stuff

[mikkeneko]

PSA to fan creators who don't have a lot of regular contact with children: They are almost always bigger than you think. A 1-year-old baby may already be walking. A toddler is likely already hip-high. A 10-year-old may already be taller than at least one of their parents. A 14/15 year old may already have reached their adult height.

[amarguerite]

Via @watertightvines

[wildjuniperjones]

Here's the link. It was actually not immediately easy to find, so I thought this might help.

[doriangraysrockcollection]

i must say, i am a huge fan of when a book is in the middle of a very exciting plot containing many interesting problems when out of nowhere for a few pages it's like, "hey by the way, real quick, here's a detailed explanation of the city's water filtration system! i'm telling you this for a reason and you should worry about it. anyway! haha okay back to the plot" and you just get to be Scared for a while

[doriangraysrockcollection]

i am kissing you on the mouth right now

you are the only person who understands me. you and the person who tagged a series of unfortunate events

[fox-bright]

Years before the covid pandemic began, author Naomi Kritzer wrote the charming, emotionally genuine short story "So Much Cooking," which was a pandemic log through the eyes of a cooking blog. The premise is that the author is a home cooking blogger raising her kids, and then a pandemic hits--and bit by bit she's feeding not only her own, but her sister's kids, some neighbors' kids, and so on, in a situation of pandemic lockdown and food shortages.

It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.

Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.

I recommend both stories. They're uplifting in a way that a lot of what I see lately isn't. They're a bit of a panacea for constant fearmongering about intracommunity violence and grinding hatefulness. We can be good to each other, if we try.

[servantofclio]

These are both excellent stories, and I also heartily recommend her story "Better Living through Algorithms."

[mikkeneko]

[orcbara]

i know most leftists agree that everybody should have a right to food, water, shelter, and healthcare but i think a vitally important fifth pillar is privacy. people should not be compelled to be tracked, monitored, or to share personal space with others to access their other essential rights

[lyinginbedmon]

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is and always has been fascist rhetoric everyone.

[alternis]

saw a post letting people know that your ao3 bookmarks are viewable on your account unless you make them private, which suggests that the median ao3 user does not use ao3 in what i will call 'the optimum fic-finding treadmill' where you find a fic author you like and look through their bookmarks to find more fics that are good and then look through that author's bookmarks for even more good fics. like a conga line of great but extremely specific tastes. or one of those chessboard rice doubling analogies and oh no that is a LOT of ao3 tabs.

[fuckingfuckersfucked-deactivate]

Well, it’s finally finished.  It was a genuinely satisfying project. I present you Ankh Morpork in the guise of Google Maps.

[pasiphile]

<makes highly undignified squeeing noises>

[discworld-heritage-posts]

Discworld Heritage Post

[teashoesandhair]

'A popular fanfic author stopped updating her fic because she said that the stress of being constantly falsely accused of using AI was a witch hunt and it was destroying her mental health to the extent that she needed to take a break from writing, leading to multiple online discussions defending her and debates about AI accusations and how You Can't Really Tell So Leave Her Alone, and then someone realised that there were Claude coding artefacts in her fics and that it was a super pervasive problem in that particular fandom, proven definitively by looking at the source coding of each work on AO3, and she denied it for a bit but then ultimately admitted that oopsie, she had been using genAI all along, and then she deleted all of her fics off AO3 and people got mad because they were being denied access to their favourite fics, even though they now knew definitively that they were genAI slop, and then it turned out that she'd actually stopped updating the fic on AO3 in the first place because she'd been shopping it around to agents and editors as an original work with the serial numbers filed off, and she'd been in conversations with a publisher which ultimately got dropped because she'd lied to them about her AI use' oh cool, so we're in Hell, then

[teashoesandhair]

Let me be clear: if you use AI to write fanfic, paticularly if you do so in the hopes of snapping up a tradpub deal off the basis of the popularity of your worthless slop, then you are an absolute grade A ding-dong, and may the vengeful spirits of our beloved Spirk Elders haunt you via the medium of perpetual papercuts forevermore.

[creativitycache]

I am unaware of who this is referring to and feel like a small fishing boat that just saw the dorsal fin of Leviathan off the starboard bow

[teashoesandhair]

That is so extremely valid, and truly I wish that I had not myself plunged into the depths and seen the truth of the Leviathan (a gigantic plastic fish effigy that's broken off a derelict Fish & Chip shop and washed into the Atlantic: a harbinger of doom in its own synthetic tongue)

[lttrsfrmlnrrgby]

So many lessons in fandom and life boil down to make your own works for love of the game, don't go looking for ways to be an asshole to people, don't lie when people ask you something that challenges you to be better, and don't fucking cheat.

[littlepinkbeast]

look, it's easy, okay? High Fantasy has An Hero whose Destiny is Sword, and Low Fantasy has Some Schmoe whose Job is Sword.

[littlepinkbeast]

expanding it to a full matrix: Sword And Sorcery has An Hero whose Job is Sword, and YA Fantasy has Some Schmoe whose Destiny is Sword.

[the-real-seebs]

wow, this is an exceptionally effective taxonomy.

[noctuamagna]

[redstonedust]

unfortunately i dont think its queerbaiting if the creator is just so terminally heterosexual that they never remotely considered the same gender relationship their show is centered around could be read as romantic. it is deeply painful however.

[melanqueerly]

Maybe accidental queer baiting? The way someone may not mean to say something rude, but it may come off rude, so it's rude. Frustrating either way.

[phinarei]

Not being a dick, just a friendly clarification.

By definition you can't accidentally queerbait. Queerbaiting is specifically using a same sex pair from the show to market the show to queer audiences with no intention of ever following through on a romantic relationship.

There is officially licensed Destiel merch signed off on by Kripke. Teen Wolf had a commercial with the actors for Derek and Stiles draped over each other talking about being "on a ship." Both shows actively used scenes between them as marketing while actively mocking fans for wanting them together. Sherlock has multiple characters refer to Johnlock as a couple, including characters we're supposed to believe are never wrong about human behavior and pushed those scenes in marketing. Then they acted insulted when fans saw them as a couple.

That's queerbaiting.

Done on accident it would just be queer subtext. Done because they had no other choice due to censorship is queer coding.

The specific meaning of the word is really starting to get lost and it's a pretty important one to keep accurate. It describes a very specific phenomenon that was done repeatedly and maliciously for decades and is meant to examine that specifically.

Doing it on accident sucks, but it isn't a tactic of capitalism intentionally intended to suppress queer representation while making money from queer fans.

[joyandotherstories]

Reblogging to keep the accurate definition and examples of queerbaiting circulating in the world

[trying-trying2lyk]

i love writing out numbers and then putting them in parentheses like "one (1)" even when i dont need to i think its funny

[justatiredlittlesnail]

[hidinhaydn]

Tonight on Game Changer:

The world's most insane game of telephone featuring six comedians, three artists, and a PA with the temperament of a shaking chihuahua being held at gunpoint

[anik]

i love this guy

[copperbadge]

I have long suspected that the owners of the rental-only apartment building across from my living room have been telling their renters that their floor-to-ceiling glass external walls are tinted and that nobody can see in. I believe I have confirmed my theory this week. 

Now, it’s possible that the Nice Lesbians who previously lived on the floor below just liked wearing sports bras without shirts and Captain Underpants who lives above them likes cooking in his boxer briefs.

But Ikea Showroom Guy, who lives above Captain Underpants and whose apartment looks like he owns one (1) personal belonging that didn’t come new from Ikea and that is a skateboard, clearly believes he can’t be seen. A few days ago I passed my living room windows on the way to the kitchen to eat breakfast and found him sitting crosslegged in his giant papasan chair facing his floor to ceiling glass walls, completely naked, eating cereal. 

I mean, congratulations, sir, you look great, but I may need to revisit the idea I had to hang a sign in my window announcing “Your windows aren’t tinted.” Technically the building doesn’t allow signs and it could really start a shitstorm and like, I don’t wanna shame Captain Underpants, who seems genuinely unselfconscious about his boxer-briefs, but these people deserve to know the truth. 

[copperbadge]

virdigrishammerrezby

#op change your wifi name to ‘your windows aren’t tinted’ to get around the no signs rule

Fucking galaxy brain, oh my god, that’s genius. AND if I do that they won’t know which neighbor caught them doing Naked Cereal / Great Underwear Bakeoff! 

[siryouarebeingmocked]

[sentient-tent]

This is Tie, she is going to eat all of the notes

[sentient-tent]

reblog to feed her notes

[elodieunderglass]

How is she doing this

[elodieunderglass]

Oh well none of my business

[knivesandteeth]

Personally love the Idea that most of star trek is reconstructed from personal logs. Because it plugs all the plot holes and explains a bunch of stuff like "why does the ferengi characterisation vary so wildly?" Humans are bigots

"why do the trills change appearance between tng and ds9?" Mistake in the logs

"why arent garak and Bashir fucking?" They are, garak keeps deleting if from the logs

[byjove]

at least now we know why he has yet to return when Britain is in peril

[kitkatmoose]

We need a flick where King Arthur wakes in modern Jamaica and is very confused.

[byjove]

I think that would be so much funny. He wakes up on a remote beach in Jamaica and he only speaks/understands Brythonic and Medieval Latin. Locals assume he was a tourist who fell from a cruise ship or received a head injury and floated away from a resort. The authorities cannot match his description to any missing persons reports and his fingerprints and DNA produce no hits on INTERPOL. They suspect he may be Welsh or French because the language he speaks resembles Welsh or Breton but France and the UK both state he is not a citizen of their country. Stateless and deeply confused, he is taken in by the community near the beach where he was found, being cared for by a number of local families and doing odd jobs. He slowly learns English and adjusts to the contemporary world, uncertain if his belief that he is the legendary King Arthur was formed by whatever traumatic event caused him to end up Jamaica or if he is actually King Arthur and Prydain is in eminent peril. Mysterious letters from Morgan begin to reaffirm his belief he is King Arthur. He must choose between staying in Jamaica and continuing the happy life he has made for himself or finding a way to get back to Britain without any documentation.

[a-daks]

ancient king white boy stuns locals by ordering in perfect Jamaican Patois

[byjove]

He gets to Britain and everyone expects him to sound like a posh noble Englishman because that is the picture Malory painted but he prefers to speak Welsh and when he has to speak English, he speaks with a thick Jamaican accent.

[thecottageinthedark]

I love this but also am DEEPLY baffled as to why this Pye fellow found a skeleton in a cave in Britain and decided to take it with him to Jamaica. What do you need a skeleton for? Why do you need to import it? They've got bones in Jamaica already. Was it just that he was Bonded to this particular skeleton and decided that he wanted its company in the Caribbean?

[byjove]

For additional context, archeological giant hoaxes were extremely common in the 19th century, they were lucrative display pieces due to a number of pseudoscientific and religious reasons. Though I could not find evidence of them existing in the 18th century, Egyptian mummies were already being exhibited in Europe. There have been some prehistoric archeological remains located in Britain and Ireland that would have been unusually tall to the 18th century audience though totally within normal limits of human height with the Old Croghan Man having an estimated height of 6'6".

My best guess, if the story has a kernel of truth, is that Mr. Pye unearthed the archeological remains of a very tall individual OR grave robbed a contemporary burial of an unusually tall person and intended to pass the skeleton off as the giant remains of King Arthur, basing his story on the folklore surrounding the cave. It would be harder to verify his claims about the origin of the skeleton outside of Britain so he headed for the New World to start scamming.

In short? I assume he was on some P. T. Barnum bullshit and/or about to attempt an archeological hoax and intended to charge people to see the bones.

[joeyclaire]

you are not an endearingly rude and unfriendly cartoon character you need to be nice to people