into the sin bin we go

Art now on @iron-oak pillowfort @ironoak

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

weighted blanket's not enough i need to be compressed by a hydraulic press

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

this website gets me

[yffresbeard]

i think it is important to recognize the ways in which your favorite thing sucks. i think it keeps u normal

[rabbithaver]

prev im so sorry to put you on blast like this but please know this had me in hysterics

[gailynovelry]

The fastest way to accomplish The Project is to cease being afraid of The Project. The Project cannot maim you. The Project cannot kill you. The Project is more afraid of you than you are of it. It is okay if The Project turns out differently from how it was in your head, and it is okay if it has flaws. You are capable of engaging with The Project.

[runawaymarbles]

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.

[zz9pzza]

Op's tags

#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op

[runawaymarbles]

The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.

[kyraneko]

This post feels like watching an iceberg go by in clear water. The amount of stuff going on beneath the surface of AO3 just astonishes.

[jeffsatyr]

(ID in alt)

[maruti-bitamin]

WAH!!

twitter/ insta/bluesky/ store

[64mpg]

me: 🧍🏽‍♂️

my nervous system: we are going to get in so much trouble seriously

[gryffon]

[baryonyxtrainor4]

*plit plit pippippappip plit*

*wit plit pippip plit*

[operating-potato]

[animentality]

[mademoisellesarcasme]

@coruscanttojerusalem this. this is it.

[tuulikki]

“Sky too big” also gets you on the tops of very tall, sharp mountains, where standing at the top means everything around you except the snow under your feet is blue sky.

[c4bl3fl4m3]

Y’all’re joking, but I remember the agoraphobia I had the very first time I spent time in prairie states. There was this terror inside of nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. It went away when I flew back to the East coast.

It was there the 2nd time too, but not quite as strongly.

Even TALKING about it now makes me feel anxious.

Laugh all you want, but when you’re used to driving a few hours and hitting ocean, and an hour and hitting mountains, being surrounded by nothing but flat and Flat and FLAT and knowing that’s all there is for hundreds of miles does things to ya.

[tuulikki]

Not even slightly joking, though. Flat places give me the horrors. At least when you go up a mountain, you went to see the sky void, and you can hike right back down and hide from it in a nice valley somewhere. Safe little critter under the nice tall trees.

Out in the Flat Places* there’s nowhere to goddam hide from the sky. It’s all nothingness from horizon to horizon, and that nothingness wants to grind you under its boot like an ant, I swear to god.

*Flat Places may vary person by person, but I absolutely am including low hill country because I think it makes it worse. You look at the hills and expect to see mountains but none appears!

[justacynicalromantic]

I don't know how you cannot love this view.

Donbas steppe

[tuulikki]

Truly, at no point would I ever say that such a landscape is not beautiful. I’m not dead to the poetry of these scenes.

But, simultaneously (and that’s the crazy part), the sky triggers my threat response.

And I know friends from plains/field/steppe-country who find it stressful to have mountains “looming” over them (their words, never mine).

Them: comforting wide horizons, I could see any threat coming. Me: I am exposed, I will fall into the sky :(

Me: comforting mountains, sheltering me in the valley. Them: these big rocks will fall on me :(

[whetstonefires]

Large Bird Will Get You

[virgulesmith]

As a child of the misty forest, this open place above is terrifying. (I felt afraid all the way through Kansas). But then, a lot of folks fear them the misty forest. Especially at night.

Photo by Ansel Adams

Photo by Nick Strait

[thebibliosphere]

For context: I'm from Scotland, and my spouse @mothman-etd is from Minnesota. I grew up surrounded by forests and hills as far as the eye can see.

When we first started dating, I'd usually only travel to see him in the Twin Cities, except one time, one of his coworkers was getting married up in North Dakota, so we made it into a road trip.

I fell asleep in the car like a true passenger princess and woke up to nothing but flatness, but not just any flatness, no. It had been raining, and the plains were filled with water, so for all intents and purposes, it was like waking up in the middle of the fucking ocean with nothing but too much sky above me and absolutely nothing around us but the endless stretch of water and the empty road in front of us.

When I tell you the primal fear that went through me. It was like falling upwards. It was like gravity just didn't exist, and there was no limit to how high my panic could rise. I had to do that stretch of the journey with my chair tipped back so I couldn't see the emptiness. Like a blinkered horse ready to bolt and break all my legs at once in a frenzied panic to escape the Nothingness.

Eventually, we pulled over at a service station, and I can honestly say I've never been so happy to see a roadside Subway in all my life.

[mothman-etd]

To add on to @thebibliosphere story, while it was raining it was also flood season. So Joy woke up to this:

All of North Dakota is the same elevation, so nothing stops the flood water. The interstate roads are built just high enough so you can still drive on them so it really looks like you are driving in the ocean when it happens. But not the normal ocean, a still, no waves, quiet ocean with random patches of trees sticking up.

Another fun tibit about this flood season is the Red River, which is the primary source of this flooding, flows north. So as the winter turns to spring the south part thaws first and smashes right into the still frozen part. Basically it's like turning on your kitchen faucet directly onto the counter instead of the sink.

[thebibliosphere]

It sure is an Experience 🥲

[preludeinz]

I am from the big flatness and I love the big flatness.

[torstherapy]

[simkaye]

I still draw all Raccoon Comics traditionally. I mostly work digitally, but there's something about traditional pencil and ink that I can't quite replicate

[thirtyskeletons]

Any day now

[thirtyskeletons]

people have suddenly started reblogging this post of mine from february 8th, 2012. great bit everybody

[thirtyskeletons]

[geeses]

reblog to diminish the horrors from the person you reblogged from

[mangoeater1000-deactivated20201]

please support this interracial french gay couple and their 20 kids

[captain-acab]

“le couple homosexuel interracial français milieu a vingt enfants” en fait c’est une erreur statistique. georgs d'enfants, qui habite dans une cave et adopte dix mille enfants chaque jour, est une donnée aberrante et il faudrait pas l’avoir compté

[anarqueer]

I don’t even speak French and I know what that paragraph says

[transboysgetknives]

“georgs d'enfants” how does it feel to be the funniest person here

[ladycreep-deactivated20201127]

[talkshows-deactivated20150818]

the anniversary of library paste man’s death is in four days.

[basketghost]

One hundred and ten years ago to the day. Amazing. Incredible.

[1dietcokeinacan]

RIP😔🙏📚🍯

[lmnlst]

[that-house]

I had to mentally send myself a reaction image the other day. I ran up the stairs on all fours, said to myself “i’m such a locationpilled scampercel” and then perfectly envisioned this image

[that-house]

please i've already hurt so much

[teaboot]

what annoys me about explaining evolution to people who don’t think it’s real is that everyone’s idea of how it works seems to be from this

Whereas the reality is far more like

[teaboot]

Was not expecting this many of you to resonate with Millennium Death Plinko

[sufficientlylargen]

One of these days the horse is gonna come out of pinko with opposable thumbs, and then we're all in trouble.