Land of Bridges and Clouds

A landless planet made of towering cloud systems, connected by wooden suspension bridges resembling the hollowed interior of avian bones. Tread lightly.... // icon by major-victory

[depsidase]

[do-not-u-dare]

Stole this from somewhere but i think it’s appropriate

[lierdumoa]

It’s literally the magic mirror that told the evil queen she’s the fairest of them all.

[niidsch]

Not seeing many people talk about this on Tumblr, so gonna spread the word myself: Webtoon is going to start using AI for translations and an AI chat bot with comic characters. If you're against this you should delete your account, and if you are publishing on the website, you should consider moving to other alternatives and especially having your own website to host your comic.

Also needless to say that Webtoon can absolutely afford to hire translators, this is just yet another way to not pay the people who are making the company behind Webtoon absurdly rich.

And for the people who might see this as a good decision:

(+ all the environmental damage that AI is causing)

[akeussel]

[norwoods-dni]

[blessicablimpson]

Anastasia Trusova — “Through The Walls”, 2020

Acrylic on linen (70 x 70 cm)

[mackdaddyofthecravate]

Please return us to a world where Notp and squick are used for a ship you don’t like instead of just making up a load of bullshit about how immoral it is or w/e lol 

[sazandorable]

a short selection of concepts and phrases that used to be commonplace in fandom and we’d really benefit from making that a thing again:

NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.

Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off. Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.

YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.

DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.

SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.

YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.

As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.

(definitions lifted more or less wholesale from fanlore’s relevant pages)

[shatterpath]

bring the healthy fun back to fandom!

[blignick]

Weighing foster kittens..they understood the assignment..🐈🐾😍

[alex51324]

the kitties long for the weighing tub

[pangur-and-grim]

Queer Books and Authors are at a Breaking Point

Authors, agents, publishers: every part of the industry is seeing the strain of five years of escalating anti-LGBTQ censorship.

[pangur-and-grim]

if you'd like to show support, here are some upcoming queer books:

When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story about two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.

This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.

and then here's a list of 26 queer books by Black authors set to publish this year, and a 10 upcoming books by trans authors. if you want to fight back against queer censorship, use your wallet! or (if that's not an option) you can contact your local library and ask them to stock a copy.

[penelopepennington]

In addition: looking for indie publishers and queer bookshops is a great way to find and support queer authors and stories of so many infinite varieties! (The following suggestions are based on my UK-centric knowledge)

(Some) Queer Presses:

Lurid Editions are "a publishing project committed to intentional and conscientious acts of archival repair". They are "attentive to how marginalised histories are forgotten and remembered, [and] hungry to rediscover overlooked queer books". They've just received funding from Arts Council England to engage queer readers in a project to contribute to the archive!

Cipher Press "We’re really keen on the idea that queer and minority stories are for everybody, and we want to make our books – and the stories they tell - accessible to all" (what an amazing mission statement!)

Anamot Press "Anamot [Անամոթ] means shameless in Armenian. ⁣⁣Anamot Press publishes poetry and prose on intersecting experiences of gender, sexuality, race, migration, class, belonging and loss - with no shame."

(Some) Queer Bookshops

Queer Lit Oh man, I remember when this was just a tiny little shop, and now they're the biggest LGBT+ bookshop in Europe! They do amazing work in donating books about being trans to schools and parliament! They have a pay-it-forward board that will make you sob with its notes of love and support. (You can tell I wish I still lived nearby)

Lighthouse For Scottish friends - "a queer-owned and woman led independent community bookshop. We are an unapologetically activist, intersectional, feminist, antiracist, lgbtq+ community space"

Gay's The Word The OG Queer bookshop in the UK. One day I will make my pilgrimage!!

This really is just a tiny snapshot of all the amazing work of celebration and resistance that's being done for Queer literature at the moment. We live in frightening times, but I promise there is still lots of love and joy and hope out there in spaces like these. Support them in whatever way you can!!

[elizmanderson]

this queer author is so very tired but I have a queer cozy fantasy that's out now (left) and a queer cozy horror that releases in July (right), both adult

The Keeper of Lonely Spirits is about an old man cursed with immortality, loss, grief, and the meaning of home

The Lord of the Wood is about a man having a queer awakening in an enchanted forest, the sister who comes after him, and realizing worth doesn't lie in usefulness

[kdinjenzen]

As of TODAY Twitch has quietly added the Generative Ai Training model into your account without your permission.

For the time being it is TOGGLEABLE and you can TURN IT OFF!

However, we do not know if Twitch will force this to be on at all times like some other platforms, like X/Twitter, have previously done.

Regardless of IF YOU STREAM OR NOT you should TURN THIS "TRAINING FOR GENERATIVE AI" SETTING OFF IMMEDIATELY!

To do so you must go to: https://www.twitch.tv/settings/security

And then scroll all the way down near the bottom.

There you'll find the "Training for Generative Ai" setting, toggle it to OFF!

Be sure to keep sending messages to Twitch that you do NOT want this to exist.

And another reminder that if you do stream on Twitch, like I do, you should start preparing you and your audiences to migrate elsewhere ASAP.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

like idk man it just feels genuinely parodic to dedicate hours to analyzing how foodways have frequently been used as white supremacist propaganda and then casually toss out an argument that pretty invariably demonizes indigenous hunting practices with 0 regard for traditional knowledge and land stewardship guiding those practices

[deramin2]

Every time I hear a white vegan say that I want to throw the rubble of the Klamath Dams at them.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

The Klamath River Runs Free

The Klamath River Runs Free

[supreme-leader-stoat]

#also do you have any idea how much conservation is funded by people who want to eat those animals#at least in the us anytime someone buys ammo or hunting equipment or hunting licenses that money goes directly to state wildlife agencies

[evergreen-femme]

had to share this

[bloodsbane]

inspirational figure

[tpwrtrmnky]

the real answer to almost every "does [identity A] belong in [identity B] spaces" question is actually just "these spaces are informal social groups and if you're cool you can hang, don't worry about it"

[tpwrtrmnky]

You can be Homer Simpson at the lesbian bar. It's fine. Don't worry about it.

[lizardlicks]

not without those fire exits I'm not. have fun in your death trap, ladies

[mrsandman42069]

[retquits]

MS paint pikmin warm ups/cool downs 🍒🫐🍋

[byjove]

Someone mentioned how they were having a hard time creating a world for their fantasy fiction geographically because they kept reinventing the island of Britain, which also happened to my good close enemy George R. R. Martin. I would like to suggest North Carolina. I know that sounds absolutely ridiculous but North Carolina has an awesome geographic setup for a fantasy kingdom, I think. Inhospitable barrier islands, constantly shifting shoals in the sound, swamps with alligators, venomous snakes and carnivorous plants, lots of very flat and somewhat sparsely populated farmland, foothills, mines, mountains full of mysterious phenomenon that were originally very difficult to navigate and people still get lost in today. It kind of rocks.

[the-ice-queen-623]

AND VENUS FLYTRAPS ARE NATIVE TO THE CAROLINAS!

[byjove]

There are actually 36 carnivorous plant species native to North Carolina, roughly half of all carnivorous plant species in the United States are found in North Carolina! I added the carnivorous plant detail because that’s something I love about the state. We have so many fucking bugs that the plants keep evolving to eat them.

I love that giant man eating Venus flytraps are worldbuilding staples in untamed tropical fantasy settings but they’re actually native to a small region in the Carolinas.

[byjove]

And I agree with the notes, the Chesapeake Bay + Great Dismal Swamp (partially in NC anyway) and the South Carolina Lowcountry would be good geographic additions to this.

[sleepyquietgirl]

I feel like I am taking crazy pills

[a-sort-of-femby-philosophy]

not fake unfortunately:

Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave’

Power cable linking UK and Ireland now passes near Bronze Age human burial remains instead of fictional grave on Welsh beach

[nothorses]

Dude it's so much worse

[ymutate]

Helen Whitaker, England

" Sycamore Seed "

Glass , copper and brass

[kaluxis]

That's the shape of a maple seed. I wonder if the incorrect name was intentional. Sycamore seeds are a little teardrop with a fluffy end, and a hundred or so are compacted in a tight ball before they disperse.

[linguisticparadox]

I think it might just be an error. Here's a link:

https://www.barleystudio.co.uk/portfolio/scarborough-hospital-multi-faith-chapel/

The title is probably more properly "Prayer Tree," but in the description she does say it's "based on the form and shape of a sycamore seed, inspired by its rich symbolism and many associations."

Idk how the error came about, of course. But there it is.

[batbetbitbotbut]

It's regional - she is in the UK and "sycamore" here exclusively refers to Acer pseudoplatanus which Americans call "sycamore maple". We don't have Platanus occidentalis at all (er, that I've seen, they probably grow somewhere), which appears to be what Americans call just "sycamore".

^ When I was a very young child I knew these as helicopter seeds, but then I learnt the "proper" name as sycamore. These are everywhere. Nobody calls them maple.

^ I have neve seen these before in my life, I had no idea such a seed existed, they are utterly bizarre to me. I am delighted to find out about them!