the view from an unbalanced mind

[mad-persephone]

well, its been a long time.

Its been so long that everything is very different.

But I am back. It is nice to be home to tumblr again. I am slowly recovering from dental surgery. After nearly 20 years of corticosteroids keeping me alive, they finally killed my teeth. They just crumbled in the end. If you add steroids, Ehlers danlos syndrome and epileptic seizures shattering them on the regular, it was a miracle that they lasted nearly 40 years. In january, it became clear it was Time. so on the 21st of feb I had full upper and lower extractions and a complete denture put in. Unfortunately, there were some significant complications. it was under twilight sedation, and I kept waking up, having breathing problems, the local anaesthetic kept wearing off. My poor dental surgeon, who is also my regular dentist had to use more anaesthetic on me than he has on any individual in his entire career. Lookin at you, EDS.... *glares*... anyway, it was nasty, and cos of the crumbling and shattering when they were being removed, it was not so much an extraction as an excavation. nearly every tooth had to be cut out in some way. there are some very fine shards working their way through the gum which is an experience. So there was a monumental amount of stitches. So recovery has been slow and painful, but each day is getting better than the previous. And it will never, ever be like those first few nights ever again, so that is something. Unfortunately my concentration was utterly blitzed during this process. The first night back I watched fangs of fortune on my laptop, purely because I found the pun amusing. It made me laugh and cheered me up. but i couldnt focus on it. its taken till this week to be able to do a significant chunk of my language work without making stupid mistakes, and was able to get out a decent sketch. I'm working on a pastel portrait that got halted by this mess, so I'm hoping I can get back into that today.

I finished a portrait just before all this happened, and I'm really proud of it. ZYZ from fangs of fortune. I was really happy with how I got the fabric and the skintone. Would absolutely adore some feedback on it. Currently working on ZZS from word of honor. Next will be ZYC from FoF, and then WKX from WOH. Im chopping and changing between them, so I don't get stuck in one, as im combining the two in a crossover. Will also eventually do Ying Long and Bing Yi.

[vro0ms-evil-twin]

I fucking hate that the general response to RFK Jr's eugenist take on autistic people is "autistic people do pay taxes, autistic people do work, autistic people do date!"

Some autistic people don't and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life. Some autistic people do need constant help and support and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life.

Once again we're falling in the right wing trap of :

They make a hateful, fascist statement

Instead of focusing on the fact that it is hateful and fascist we try to show them that they are factually wrong

We throw our own allies and the most vulnerable of us under the bus in the process

We legitimise an only slightly less hateful, fascist view as we go

They have completed their goal of making us accept the still hateful, fascist second version, hurrah. What a victory.

Right now what we're getting to with that is that autistic people who can work and pay taxes are okay, and the others aren't. Fuck this shit.

Same thing happens with the people who are being deported ("they have a visa!", "they didn't even have a criminal record!" -> even if they didn't have a visa, even if they did have a criminal record, deporting them and detaining them in what's essentially a concentration camp wouldn't be okay, you absolute tools of fascism.)

[anexcellentshot]

writing advice: smells!

they say smells are strong memories. if you have a setting/character, match it with a perfume, cologne, or candle irl and build that association. it makes it so much easier to write when you have that inspiration to smell right next to you.

i've even thought about getting perfume samplers to find the perfect ones for my characters. it felt like an unlocked ability when i realized this!!

[aureliobooks]

my dad likes to call the stretches of time where you’re not creating “dreaming periods” and says that they’re meant to allow you to absorb all of the beauty, life, and inspiration from the things around you so that when you’re able to create again, you will have fanned your spark back into a flame. sometimes its hard to see those moments as anything but stagnation, but he always says that they’re natural and healthy and needed—things that should be embraced rather than feared.

[hypnolectric]

the funniest part of fangs of fortune to me has to be that the little piece of zhu yan's soul ended up going to zhuo yichen all on its own

like zhao yuanzhou really went "ok this boy is never gonna find me, guess i still gotta do eVerYtHinG mySelF"

[theerakits-archive]

Bing Yi & Ying Long — Fangs of Fortune ☆ Ep.27

[movielosophy]

Fangs of Fortune | pretty

[theconcealedweapon]

[secularbakedgoods]

the rapid disintegration of rainbow capitalism pretty much encapsulates the problem with rainbow capitalism in the first place: it is and always was performative fair-weather allyship that evaporated in the face of any real political pressure

[armchairsoapbox]

Problem? It was never a problem, unless you had unrealistic expectations for what it meant. It was a symptom, and a good one. — Be strategic and think about this deeper for a minute.

It was absolutely performative fair-weather allyship. But it was a bellwether that the pink dollar was worth taking over any hypothetical backlash a business might face for supporting the queers. For some, and at some times in the past, it was a reassurance that they would do business with you even if they knew you were gay, and that was a huge issue if you eg. wanted to buy a house or a car. And it helped make queerness both more visible and more normalised in society, instead of trying to sweep teh gays back into the closet.

You’re not going to get rid of cynical cash grabs so long as capitalism is around, so you might as well be clear-eyed about it and recognise that while rainbow merch is totally unreliable for actual support, it was a sign that the smart money was betting in your favour.

[lyricwritesprose]

You can always trust a business to find a sort of middle space that's vaguely agreeable to most of its customers and sit there avoiding all controversy in the absolute most craven and soulless way possible.

This means that a business is in fact a very good indicator of what's vaguely agreeable to most of its customers and what counts as controversy.

Don't think of them as allies. They aren't people. They can't be. Think of them as a barometer. If the barometer is up, you've probably got sunny skies. When the barometer starts dropping, prepare for heavy weather moving in.

[draconym]

I often refer to rainbow capitalism as an indicator species. Not a keystone species, not a load-bearing organism holding an ecosystem (or an economic system) together. Rainbow capitalism is fragile like a frog species dependent on clean water and an abundance of insects. When its environment changes, becomes polluted, becomes fragmented, it vanishes. Its presence or absence indicates to observers the health of its surroundings just as a literal indicator species reflects whether specific environmental conditions are met.

[whoisthatmovinginthedark]

First time watching, for over two thirds of the drama I assumed zhu yan had already processed and moved on from his break-up from li lun, and it's mostly li lun who's still hung up on their past. I came to think very differently during the later episodes of course. And since then, it's been very obvious to see how much he keeps thinking about li lun even in the early episodes. How much of a sore spot it is. Truth eyes get mentioned in conversation, and he zones out with a somber expression. Any sincere conversations about li lun he evades. For no reason at all he suddenly brings up how much some tree demons enjoy taking in the sun (which might or might not be li lun related, but the former just feels likeliest to me). All those little things here and there, a constant presence buried somewhere deep in his mind, unsuccessfully swept under the rug.

[givingbadpeoplegoodideas]

clicking a pen over and over again is actually fun as fuck its a shame it makes everyone in a 30 foot radius want to kill me with a rock

[valeyks22]

New post on YouTube

[bundibird]

Trump is all like "Australians sell their beef to us, but they won't buy any of ours 😡"

Which.... yeah? Of course???? Why would we import external beef from so far away when we produce more than enough to meet our own needs??

Not to mention that USA still has both mad cow disease and foot and mouth disease, but Australia doesn't -- AND America has increasingly lax commercial-level health and safety standards, meaning the risk of pathogens like MCD/F&M spreading through the US are significantly increased, and we don't have either here in Australia, so of course we don't want to import beef from a country that could conceivably spread the diseases to us???

But even aside from that. There are not that many Australians. But there are a lot of Americans. AND Australians eat an average of 23.4 kilos of beef per year but we produce 2.2 million tonnes. We produce WAY more beef than our population eats. So of course we don't import much????? And of COURSE it's not from America, which is both significantly further away than our current importers (primarily New Zealand and Japan), AND which has significantly lower health and safety regulations than we do????

Meanwhile, Americans average aprox 37 kilos of beef per person per year, but produces around 12.4 million tonnes. USAs population is 12 times larger than ours but only produces 5 times more beef than we do, AND consumes more per capita than we do. Of course USA imports large quantities of beef. Because their domestic production doesn't meet their domestic demand. Meanwhile Australia's production vastly outweighs our domestic demand, so of course we don't import American beef?????

Thats...... that's how imports and exports are supposed to work???? You export excess of what you have to someone who has less of it, and in turn, they export to you the produce/products that YOU don't have. This is fucking basic??????????

"Waahhh, Australia won't import American beef 😭😡" yeah???? Of course we don't????????

PLUS!!!!! Overall, Australia imports 34 billion dollars worth of stuff from America per year. Meanwhile America only imports $16 billion from us.

Putting tariffs on a country that imports more from you than they export to you is uhhhhhhhhh, FUCKIN' STUPID. If america tariff everything we send to them it's on all of $16b worth of stuff. If we tariff everything of theirs then we'll be slapping taxes on more than double what they can tax us.

Trump is such a fucking moron.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Does this man not understand that the point of trade is to swap what you have an excess of for what you don't have enough of

Why would we export masses and masses of beef only to import large amounts of inferior quality beef from the same people we just sold beef to

Does he think the USA is exporting large quantities of oil to Saudi Arabia?

[dor-min]

why aren't Australians clamouring to receive such exotic US beef flavours as

disease

[animentality]

[corviiids]

btw it is sexy and cool to uplift and admire people who have skills you wish you had without using their ability as a stick to beat yourself with. even and especially if you are jealous of them.

[waytoomuchinformation]

I put this in the tags at first but I mean it so much it needs to go on the dang post.

Jesus fuck please read this and take it to heart. Compliments for my work or my appearance that bash the complement giver really fuck me up y’all. It's not a compliment that I make you feel like shit about yourself. I hate it actually.

It's one of the only reasons l've ever considered stopping posting my stuff online. You don't have to lift anyone up by bringing others or yourself down. Please stop. If we all win we all win.

Let the beauty of humans and life inspire you. Please for the love of life romanticize yourself and your life in little ways every day.

[copepods]

i like working at plant store. sometimes you ring up someone and there's a slug on their plant and so you're like "Oh haha you've got a friend there let me get that for you" and you put the slug on your hand for safekeeping but then its really busy and you dont have time to take the slug outside before the next customer in line so you just have a slug chilling on your hand for 15 minutes. really makes you feel at peace with nature. also it means sometimes i get to say my favorite line which is "would you like this free slug with your purchase"

[copepods]

@holyknuckled you get it. lterally what are we here on earth for if not to occasionally impose gastropods upon unsuspecting customers. this story is delightful

[lintubintu]

@holyknuckled like that?

[holyknuckled]

oh? my god???

yeah, Exactly like that

[boatgrave-deactivated20250901]

[mysteryteacup]

*Scrolls past*

*reluctant sigh*

*scrolls back up*

*rebogs*