Fern's Art @miniaturefern - Tumblr Blog

Well, I think it's that time. Thank you all for the support over the years, but it's time to admit that I'm not using this blog anymore and move on to other things. I don't plan to delete it, but I wanted to let you know that I won't be available on this blog from here on out. If you follow me: thank you, sincerely, and I wish you all the best!

lionfloss

'Under Monet's Pond' by Eiko Jones

Life has been throwing way too many things at me at once lately. I know I'll get through them, but sheesh.

Anyway, have a bird!

#my art #ink #bird #osprey #watercolor #the first time i posted it it was too small oops this is a repost

ruffboi-mags

I just.

You don’t need a reason to not like a ship. You don’t need a reason not to ship a ship, canon or otherwise. You don’t have to prove it’s “problematic” or “abusive” or any of that shit.

You’re allowed to just not like it. You can literally just say “eh, I don’t like it, it’s just not my thing” and that’s valid. You don’t have to explain it or excuse it. Just say you don’t like it and move the fuck on, for fuck’s sake.

I am BEGGING y’all.

chuckdrawsthings

snap out of it

#it me rn #others' art

werenotreallystrangers

naussensei

Shout-out to all multilingual fanfic writers who put a lot of effort in writing in their second or third language.

Shout-out to all multilingual fanfic readers who leave a comment in a language that is not their first. These are my all time favourites. Never apologize for lacking the grammar to leave a perfect comment. The effort you make to read and then write something just to let me know how my story made you feel is the most heart-warming feeling a writer can get.

spotlessmy-deactivated20210523

this was a great read. “Laziness Does Not Exist” by Devon Price

gandalfs-mommy-milkers

does anyone have a direct link to the article, or a place i can read it without an account on the above website?

oblivious-chaos

Devon actually has a book, you can download it for free from here without any account- https://ca1lib.org/book/16818707/4ea6f2

Z-Library single sign on | Z-Library. Download books for free. Find books

And the full article is copy-pasted below the cut

I’ve been a psychology professor since 2012. In the past six years, I’ve witnessed students of all ages procrastinate on papers, skip presentation days, miss assignments, and let due dates fly by. I’ve seen promising prospective grad students fail to get applications in on time; I’ve watched PhD candidates take months or years revising a single dissertation draft; I once had a student who enrolled in the same class of mine two semesters in a row, and never turned in anything either time. I don’t think laziness was ever at fault. Ever. In fact, I don’t believe that laziness exists. I’m a social psychologist, so I’m interested primarily in the situational and contextual factors that drive human behavior. When you’re seeking to predict or explain a person’s actions, looking at the social norms, and the person’s context, is usually a pretty safe bet. Situational constraints typically predict behavior far better than personality, intelligence, or other individual-level traits. So when I see a student failing to complete assignments, missing deadlines, or not delivering results in other aspects of their life, I’m moved to ask: what are the situational factors holding this student back? What needs are currently not being met? And, when it comes to behavioral “laziness,” I’m especially moved to ask: what are the barriers to action that I can’t see? There are always barriers. Recognizing those barriers— and viewing them as legitimate — is often the first step to breaking “lazy” behavior patterns. It’s really helpful to respond to a person’s ineffective behavior with curiosity rather than judgment. I learned this from a friend of mine, the writer and activist Kimberly Longhofer (who publishes under the name Mik Everett). Kim is passionate about the acceptance and accommodation of disabled people and homeless people. Their writing about both subjects is some of the most illuminating, bias-busting work I’ve ever encountered. Part of that is because Kim is brilliant, but it’s also because at various points in their life, Kim has been both disabled and homeless. Kim is the person who taught me that judging a homeless person for wanting to buy alcohol or cigarettes is utter folly. When you’re homeless, the nights are cold, the world is unfriendly, and everything is painfully uncomfortable. Whether you’re sleeping under a bridge, in a tent, or at a shelter, it’s hard to rest easy. You are likely to have injuries or chronic conditions that bother you persistently, and little access to medical care to deal with it. You probably don’t have much healthy food. In that chronically uncomfortable, over-stimulating context, needing a drink or some cigarettes makes fucking sense. As Kim explained to me, if you’re laying out in the freezing cold, drinking some alcohol may be the only way to warm up and get to sleep. If you’re under-nourished, a few smokes may be the only thing that kills the hunger pangs. And if you’re dealing with all this while also fighting an addiction, then yes, sometimes you just need to score whatever will make the withdrawal symptoms go away, so you can survive. Kim’s incredible book about their experiences being homeless while running a bookstore. Few people who haven’t been homeless think this way. They want to moralize the decisions of poor people, perhaps to comfort themselves about the injustices of the world. For many, it’s easier to think homeless people are, in part, responsible for their suffering than it is to acknowledge the situational factors. And when you don’t fully understand a person’s context — what it feels like to be them every day, all the small annoyances and major traumas that define their life — it’s easy to impose abstract, rigid expectations on a person’s behavior. All homeless people should put down the bottle and get to work. Never mind that most of them have mental health symptoms and physical ailments, and are fighting constantly to be recognized as human. Never mind that they are unable to get a good night’s rest or a nourishing meal for weeks or months on end. Never mind that

even in my comfortable, easy life, I can’t go a few days without craving a drink or making an irresponsible purchase. They have to do better. But they’re already doing the best they can. I’ve known homeless people who worked full-time jobs, and who devoted themselves to the care of other people in their communities. A lot of homeless people have to navigate bureaucracies constantly, interfacing with social workers, case workers, police officers, shelter staff, Medicaid staff, and a slew of charities both well-meaning and condescending. It’s a lot of fucking work to be homeless. And when a homeless or poor person runs out of steam and makes a “bad decision,” there’s a damn good reason for it. If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple. I’m so grateful to Kim and their writing for making me aware of this fact. No psychology class, at any level, taught me that. But now that it is a lens that I have, I find myself applying it to all kinds of behaviors that are mistaken for signs of moral failure — and I’ve yet to find one that can’t be explained and empathized with. Let’s look at a sign of academic “laziness” that I believe is anything but: procrastination. People love to blame procrastinators for their behavior. Putting off work sure looks lazy, to an untrained eye. Even the people who are actively doing the procrastinating can mistake their behavior for laziness. You’re supposed to be doing something, and you’re not doing it — that’s a moral failure right? That means you’re weak-willed, unmotivated, and lazy, doesn’t it? For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well. When you’re paralyzed with fear of failure, or you don’t even know how to begin a massive, complicated undertaking, it’s damn hard to get shit done. It has nothing to do with desire, motivation, or moral upstandingness. Procastinators can will themselves to work for hours; they can sit in front of a blank word document, doing nothing else, and torture themselves; they can pile on the guilt again and again — none of it makes initiating the task any easier. In fact, their desire to get the damn thing done may worsen their stress and make starting the task harder. The solution, instead, is to look for what is holding the procrastinator back. If anxiety is the major barrier, the procrastinator actually needs to walk away from the computer/book/word document and engage in a relaxing activity. Being branded “lazy” by other people is likely to lead to the exact opposite behavior. Often, though, the barrier is that procrastinators have executive functioning challenges — they struggle to divide a large responsibility into a series of discrete, specific, and ordered tasks. Here’s an example of executive functioning in action: I completed my dissertation (from proposal to data collection to final defense) in a little over a year. I was able to write my dissertation pretty easily and quickly because I knew that I had to a) compile research on the topic, b) outline the paper, c) schedule regular writing periods, and d) chip away at the paper, section by section, day by day, according to a schedule I had pre-determined. Nobody had to teach me to slice up tasks like that. And nobody had to force me to adhere to my schedule. Accomplishing tasks like this is consistent with how my analytical, Autistic, hyper-focused brain works. Most people don’t have that ease. They need an external structure to keep them writing — regular writing group meetings with friends, for example — and deadlines set by someone else. When faced with a major, massive project, most people want advice

for how to divide it into smaller tasks, and a timeline for completion. In order to track progress, most people require organizational tools, such as a to-do list, calendar, datebook, or syllabus. Needing or benefiting from such things doesn’t make a person lazy. It just means they have needs. The more we embrace that, the more we can help people thrive. I had a student who was skipping class. Sometimes I’d see her lingering near the building, right before class was about to start, looking tired. Class would start, and she wouldn’t show up. When she was present in class, she was a bit withdrawn; she sat in the back of the room, eyes down, energy low. She contributed during small group work, but never talked during larger class discussions. A lot of my colleagues would look at this student and think she was lazy, disorganized, or apathetic. I know this because I’ve heard how they talk about under-performing students. There’s often rage and resentment in their words and tone — why won’t this student take my class seriously? Why won’t they make me feel important, interesting, smart? But my class had a unit on mental health stigma. It’s a passion of mine, because I’m a neuroatypical psychologist. I know how unfair my field is to people like me. The class & I talked about the unfair judgments people levy against those with mental illness; how depression is interpreted as laziness, how mood swings are framed as manipulative, how people with “severe” mental illnesses are assumed incompetent or dangerous. The quiet, occasionally-class-skipping student watched this discussion with keen interest. After class, as people filtered out of the room, she hung back and asked to talk to me. And then she disclosed that she had a mental illness and was actively working to treat it. She was busy with therapy and switching medications, and all the side effects that entails. Sometimes, she was not able to leave the house or sit still in a classroom for hours. She didn’t dare tell her other professors that this was why she was missing classes and late, sometimes, on assignments; they’d think she was using her illness as an excuse. But she trusted me to understand. And I did. And I was so, so angry that this student was made to feel responsible for her symptoms. She was balancing a full course load, a part-time job, and ongoing, serious mental health treatment. And she was capable of intuiting her needs and communicating them with others. She was a fucking badass, not a lazy fuck. I told her so. She took many more classes with me after that, and I saw her slowly come out of her shell. By her Junior and Senior years, she was an active, frank contributor to class — she even decided to talk openly with her peers about her mental illness. During class discussions, she challenged me and asked excellent, probing questions. She shared tons of media and current-events examples of psychological phenomena with us. When she was having a bad day, she told me, and I let her miss class. Other professors — including ones in the psychology department — remained judgmental towards her, but in an environment where her barriers were recognized and legitimized, she thrived. Over the years, at that same school, I encountered countless other students who were under-estimated because the barriers in their lives were not seen as legitimate. There was the young man with OCD who always came to class late, because his compulsions sometimes left him stuck in place for a few moments. There was the survivor of an abusive relationship, who was processing her trauma in therapy appointments right before my class each week. There was the young woman who had been assaulted by a peer — and who had to continue attending classes with that peer, while the school was investigating the case. These students all came to me willingly, and shared what was bothering them. Because I discussed mental illness, trauma, and stigma in my class, they knew I would be understanding. And with some accommodations, they blossomed academically. They gained confidence, made attempts at

assignments that intimidated them, raised their grades, started considering graduate school and internships. I always found myself admiring them. When I was a college student, I was nowhere near as self-aware. I hadn’t even begun my lifelong project of learning to ask for help. Students with barriers were not always treated with such kindness by my fellow psychology professors. One colleague, in particular, was infamous for providing no make-up exams and allowing no late arrivals. No matter a student’s situation, she was unflinchingly rigid in her requirements. No barrier was insurmountable, in her mind; no limitation was acceptable. People floundered in her class. They felt shame about their sexual assault histories, their anxiety symptoms, their depressive episodes. When a student who did poorly in her classes performed well in mine, she was suspicious. It’s morally repugnant to me that any educator would be so hostile to the people they are supposed to serve. It’s especially infuriating, that the person enacting this terror was a psychologist. The injustice and ignorance of it leaves me teary every time I discuss it. It’s a common attitude in many educational circles, but no student deserves to encounter it. I know, of course, that educators are not taught to reflect on what their students’ unseen barriers are. Some universities pride themselves on refusing to accommodate disabled or mentally ill students — they mistake cruelty for intellectual rigor. And, since most professors are people who succeeded academically with ease, they have trouble taking the perspective of someone with executive functioning struggles, sensory overloads, depression, self-harm histories, addictions, or eating disorders. I can see the external factors that lead to these problems. Just as I know that “lazy” behavior is not an active choice, I know that judgmental, elitist attitudes are typically borne out of situational ignorance. And that’s why I’m writing this piece. I’m hoping to awaken my fellow educators — of all levels — to the fact that if a student is struggling, they probably aren’t choosing to. They probably want to do well. They probably are trying. More broadly, I want all people to take a curious and empathic approach to individuals whom they initially want to judge as “lazy” or irresponsible. If a person can’t get out of bed, something is making them exhausted. If a student isn’t writing papers, there’s some aspect of the assignment that they can’t do without help. If an employee misses deadlines constantly, something is making organization and deadline-meeting difficult. Even if a person is actively choosing to self-sabotage, there’s a reason for it — some fear they’re working through, some need not being met, a lack of self-esteem being expressed. People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder. Maybe you weren’t always able to look at human behavior this way. That’s okay. Now you are. Give it a try.

miniaturefern

I've been thinking a lot about how to govern/manage internet spaces lately, after leaving a discord server that was supposed to be a safe space for everyone, but, well, didn't feel safe to me at all. I don't lead any groups myself right now, but I might eventually. This may help out in the future.

The group in question had a long list of things that required trigger warnings and spoiler usage. One thing I noticed was that all of the triggers were listed with equal weight, even though some of them were specific and more violent (for example, mentioning choking) while some were much more broad (for example, mentioning anything to do with Harry Potter). I don't know about the other members, but it was easy for me to avoid mentioning choking (for example), or at least be ready to spoiler it if I did (I'm used to spoilering things that feel violent or death-related) but it was a drain on my mental resources to avoid, or remember to spoiler, things like mentioning 'Gryffindor'. It was hard to have a lively conversation while remembering which things needed to be blacked out.

Another interesting thing about the TW list was that it contained a character from the manga series that we were all there to discuss. I'm a member of a naturalist discord server and I'm arachnophobic, but I would never think to ask the mods to make sure everyone spoilered out the pictures of the cool spiders and scorpions they found. Dealing with natural things that you Really Don't Like is part of being a naturalist, and if I can't handle that, I don't belong in the group. And that's okay! Not every space is for everybody. If I go on chat and I see spiders (that aren't jumping spiders, weirdly, I can handle those) mentioned, I go to another channel, or another server.

I feel strongly that if you're so triggered and repelled by a certain character that you can't even handle mentions of them, you should not be participating in a discussion about the media that contains that character. If the mods require TWs about that character, they are putting one group member's preferences above the entire group's ability to freely discuss the material they're all there to discuss, and I don't think that's the right way to handle the situation. I think, if I were modding a group, having a character who's in the series (from fairly early on, so not, like, a final boss whose appearance is a 'spoiler' spoiler) in the tw-and-black-out list is something that I wouldn't allow.

Also, if you need TWs for characters or for "problematic" relationships, that creates situations where everyone's talking about their favorite ships, and most people say "my favorite is [this guy] and [this guy]", but if you're "weird" you have to say "Ooh, my favorite is {BLACKED OUT TEXT}." That's. Not. Fair. I can understand people wanting CWs on detailed descriptions of sexual acts or whatever, but mentioning your preferences NEEDS to be okay, or else free discussion is just... fucked. You're going to marginalize anyone who isn't 'normal', and end up with an echo chamber.

Another thing that was a problem was the way the TWs were enforced by the mods. It wasn't clear which topics were 'mention it and you will be reprimanded' or 'it's okay to mention just don't go into detail'... and, frankly, it needs to be. For someone like me with C-PTSD (and many other neurodivergent people), being publicly corrected is very painful. The rules need to be clear for us to feel safe, it's not enough to say "we'll tell you if you're doing it wrong". The rules were NOT clear.

I'll bet, if you were there when the server got started, and you were one of the people to write your triggers on the wall along with everyone else, it feels more like a mutual 'let's all take care of one another' kinda situation. But to a new member, it's like you've just gotten to a room where a book club is taking place, and there's a big list of things written on the wall that you have to whisper about if you want to mention them... maybe. You hear someone mention one of the things out loud and a moderator nods, and then you hear someone else mention that same thing in a different context and a moderator snaps at them and tells them they have to whisper any time they mention that thing (this was my experience with the way the mods treated The Forbidden Character). It's hard to negotiate!

The safe way to handle that situation, for someone like me, is to never mention anything from the list... but the list is long and contains elements found IN the book you're there to talk about (both characters and relationships), so it severely limits what you can say if you don't want to be snapped at. It feels like they don't even want new members to be able to safely participate... but all the folks there to discuss things seem nice, and like they welcome newcomers. It feels... dissonant. And stressful!

I think the server wasn't clear about where their priorities were. In my opinion, if the focus of the group is safety for the members, rather than free discussion of the material, that should probably be clear in the server name/welcome post. If the focus is discussion of the material, then people need to be able to discuss canon-typical violence, relationships, and, well, characters, without having to black things out.

Also, frankly, (and here's where I get a little bit petty, forgive me) I didn't feel respected when interacting with the mods. It felt like they weren't open to new ideas: they decided things, and what they said was what was going to happen. In my experience, they acted more like teachers dealing with problem students than like peers moderating a discussion group. I didn't like feeling like I might "get in trouble" (their words) in a discussion space on the internet run by peers. (Obviously, if I start spamming or being really rude to other members or posting random images from hardcore erotica, then, yeah, I'd expect to get gagged or banned. But.... they're not everyone's moms. And I didn't feel like they KNEW that.)

I guess, at the root of this, is the idea of safety, and whose responsibility it is. Is it everyone's responsibility that you are safe, or is it yours? Can you ask hundreds of people to never mention something you don't like without blacking it out first, or should you click away if you see something you're uncomfortable with? Is there a middle ground where TWs are required for, say, more than two sentences about a topic, but not for mentions? Would it be helpful to have a trigger tier list? Is it the job of the moderator to keep things fully safe for everyone, or is it their job to step in when people are being disrespectful to one another and/or trolls happen to join?

Maybe it's all about different communication styles. It's a lot to think about, and I don't have the answers yet.

miniaturefern

The tw list was one thing, the mod enforcement was something different.

On the subject of The Problematic Character (henceforth TPC), I can understand someone being sensitive to the messed-up things he does. But if someone can't stand him to the point of being uncomfortable with a mention, it probably isn't good for their mental health to hang out in any space for fans of the authors of this series, because he's clearly an important part of their worldbuilding. (He's been a decent-sized part of three of their series!) If you're uncomfortable hearing details about shit he pulled in the other series, that's fine, and I think that could potentially be within the scope of okay things to ask people to tw and black out. But having to tw even mentions of him... that's (quietly) punishing people who like him as a character. Everyone else can say their favorites out loud and talk about them, but you have to black yours out? It's an other-ing sort of feeling, not inclusive at all. :/ When I joined, I thought that mentions were okay as long as you didn't go into detail, and I saw someone mention him fighting at one point without being reprimanded. However, in the forever-deleted convo that pushed me out, someone else mentioned liking TPC and His Tragic Other Half (we all know who I'm talking about here, I think) as a messed-up-love kind of ship, and a mod (the mod who deleted the convo) immediately snapped at her and told her, brusquely, that it was a trigger and needed to be blacked out right away. The person in question blacked it out. I was confused, though, because in the tws it mentioned him and listed the other series, and I said okay and asked the mod to clarify that in the tws, and she just said 'well I'm telling you now, every mention of him anywhere needs a tw'. So. Yeah. We're here to discuss a series and and we're pulling some 'He Who Must Not Be Named' shit on one of the characters in that series? How about we do that to the ones who tear people's arms off or eyes out in the actual series in question, too? It's not like everyone else is a fluffy kitten who never does anything fucked up. Personally, I like TPC a lot. I am aware that he does horrifying shit in other series. I have read them. I think the authors want to discuss 'fated' relationships and the mistakes some of us make due to strong feelings and traumatic situations-of-origin, and while he's not a "good guy" by real-life standards (by a long shot!), I think he's a massively interesting and deeply tragic fictional character. I spend a decent amount of time in MDZS fanspaces these days and there's an important side character from the series who, in-series, has done lots of messed-up stuff, and, more importantly, whom I hate. Who triggers childhood issues for me. And whom I'm seriously repulsed by. And he is popular! For many people, he's their favorite character. When discussions take a turn and become all about him, I click away, because he's a legitimate part of the series and it's not everyone else's job to like the same things that I like... but it's up to me to keep an eye on myself, and take care of myself if I get my issues triggered. IDK. Communication is hard. The server we were on wasn't my space, so I didn't get to make and enforce the rules, but I wish I could have heard more about everyone's takes in a more neutral setting. :/ It's such an interesting series, and so many people on there were so passionate about it. (@villainfuck I'm putting this here where I have more space! Btw, yours was the take I was most interested in. Your critical response to the most popular character made me excited to re-read the series. I love thinking about stories.)

quiltinginspo

“Garden Nasturtium” by Jungsun Jung

Art year in review! ...a whole bunch of things I haven't posted, huh? Last year felt like such a stressful trash fire, I feel like I didn't get anything done... but looking through my work again, I see a lot of training in both analog and digital art. Maybe I didn't get a lot done, but I think the things I make in the future will be even better.

#my art