maidens if you are going to flee dramatically from my castle in the middle of the night once i reveal my true nature to you please leave your candelabra on the little ledge by the portcullis we are running out of them
starting to think these maidens are stumbling in soaked through from the rain just to steal my beautiful gowns and homewear are any of you actually lost
At the checkout in Home Goods loading the belt with nothing but candelabras in all shapes & sizes while the cashier watches sympathetically and asks if it’s the maidens again
“We all knew that he was obviously quite ill, and it was pretty clear that this was going to be the last role he would play in a movie. And the fact that it was one of the Final Destination movies made it that much more poignant. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, our directors, they made a very shrewd decision to take the last couple of lines that were scripted and say, ‘Tony, just say what you would want to say to the fans. What would you like to impart to them in this moment?' So, everything that makes that scene so emotional is authentic because that was just Tony talking through the camera to the very fans who supported him for so many years. So, it was a very magical moment on set."
Craig Perry, producer for FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES (2025)
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"
@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
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a movie first and foremost about the destruction of minority neighborhoods and public transit by the American car industry. After that, it's a technological milestone. And then it's about cartoons
#and then it's about how 'promiscuous' women are dehumanised and vilified#“of course jessica's unfaithful to roger”#“of course she's sleeping around”#“of course she can't be trusted. look at her”#ignoring the fact that she was quite literally designed to be an object of attraction#she uses her looks to entertain men bc performing is literally her job#nothing else#you could easily draw parallels between jessica's treatment by characters in the movie and how people think about/treat sex workers irl#“i'm not bad i'm just drawn that way” is an iconic line for a reason and it's TRUE#she quite literally can't help the way she looks if she wanted to#part of the reason she works so well as a red herring is because of the assumptions made abt her#both by the characters AND the audience#the femme fatale trope and how female sexuality is vilified in media primes an audience not to trust promiscuous women in film#and jessica initially seems to fit the bill perfectly#it's straight up a plot twist that jessica is genuinely a faithful and loving wife to roger#that her intentions are pure#(even if she really didn't have to knock him out and put him in the trunk so he wouldn't get hurt. but they lampshade it and it's funny so)#hell. reading further into it you could make a case that part of the reason she fell for roger is because he loves her for who she is#he always had faith in her. five seconds after being presented with photographic evidence of her “cheating” he vehemently denies it#and then he WRITES HER A LOVE POEM#one line that always sticks with me is “what a lucky gal” from betty boop. from a toon's perspective jessica is lucky to have roger#not the other way round#toons don't have beauty standards. not like humans do.#the measure of the worth of a toon in society is first and foremost being funny#which. in that case roger is an amazing toon#the notable exception in that case is jessica. who was designed to illicit a ahem different reaction in audiences#she is an extremely unconventional toon because she is not funny. that's literally not her intended effect. which is mindboggling for a toon#no wonder she's seen as the lucky one#and roger loves her so fully and unconditionally#sorry for veering off topic but i have so many Emotions about jessica rabbit }
And what's so bloody wonderful about all of the above is that none of this is fanon or subtext. It's the text. It's all right there.
They could have given us a silly movie with no substance. I mean, we were expecting a wacky comedy built around the gimmick. Instead we got THAT.
Not to mention that they actively looked for ways to make their jobs harder in order to add that much more detail.
Status report: In the "Adventures in Staying Housed" dep't...
Greetings to the Bluesky folks who've dropped by! Just to confirm what's going on:
We're hoping to sign the lease on our rented house in a couple/few days (as soon as the dust from the St. Patrick's Day bank holiday has settled), but despite best efforts, we've got some rental arrears that we're very much hoping to be able to deal with in the short term, to make sure the signing happens. Some extra cash flow in the short term would therefore be a really big help.
With that in mind, may I possibly point you at the following SF and fantasy ebook bundles at our ebook store? All are DRM-free and come with our lifetime replacement guarantee if you lose the files or your reading device, change platforms, or whatever. (With this caveat only: due to Brexit, we can no longer sell into the UK. Our profound apologies.) And once you buy a book from us, you own it. Period.
Our store's full inventory of the revised/edited Young Wizards young adult SF/fantasy novels, and the interstitial works that go with them, is here:
This bundle contains all the Young Wizards material in the Ebooks Direct inventory. That's nineteen ebooks, containing:
The nine New Mille
All the current works in the LGBTQ-centered Middle Kingdoms adult fantasy universe are here:
This bundle contains all the Middle Kingdoms material in the Ebooks Direct inventory. That's ten ebooks, including:
The three main-sequenc
And should you be feeling expansive, the bundle containing our entire store inventory—36 ebooks at present—is here:
This ebook bundle (not available in the UK: details below) contains our complete inventory of non-new-release* works. All our ebooks are DRM
...Finally: if you're all ebooked up at the moment, but you'd still like to be of assistance... after some public-demand style noodging, we've finally installed a Ko-Fi. If you choose to go this route, please consider yourself thanked in advance for your thoughtfulness! We very much appreciate it.
Support Diane Duane On Ko-fi. Ko-fi lets you support the people and causes you love with small donations
Thanks so much, everybody! ❤ ...And we very much look forward to enlarging your TBR pile.
(And our deepest thanks, also, to those who've already become involved in this effort, one way or the other. We're thinking of you with constant and amazed affection.)
I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.
And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.
It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!
Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.
We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.
And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.
We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.
Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.
ADHD money/budgeting system I'm currently using for my benefit is going well (I've been using it for like half a year now?), and I wanna recommend it.
You Need a Budget is EXCELLENT. 10/10 do recommend. Uhhh rambling about it and my generic disclaimers + gushing extensively under the cut but TL;DR I think it's great for ADHD ppl, I've used it for 6+ months now and I find it super SUPER helpful. also weirdly fun.
DISCLAIMERS:
Budgeting helps you understand/know your money, it can't make money appear where there is none.
Everyone should learn to budget even if you don't have much money (especially then)
This is NOT a magic trick solution. Just like everything else, it is an assistive tool. This is one of those adult things we can't simply opt out of without negative consequences, though.
My advice is based on something I am currently able to do. That is, I can spend an amount of money on this specific thing that works well for me. If you have no extra money to spend then previously I was tracking things in a notebook. So you can still do this.
I believe Dave Ramsey is a fundie fraud/hack and no one should listen to him about money.
DID YOU KNOW THEY CANCELLED MINT???
Okay? OKAY.
Ahem.
You Need a Budget is EXCELLENT.
It is called YNAB for short. The first 34 days are your free trial, and that is my referral link. If anyone uses it and then signs up for a subscription, we both get a month free. Also you can share a subscription with up to six people (account owner can see everything but individuals can pick and choose what they share amongst each other) so like...idk your whole polycule can be on one account. Or your kids. Whatever.
If you are a student, it's free for a year. If you aren't, a subscription is $99 for a year (paid all at once) or $14.99 monthly, which is equivalent to paying Amazon prime. Go cancel Prime and get this instead tbh.
They got a whole article just on ynab and ADHD. They also have like...a big variety of ways to access their info? They have a book, podcast episodes, YouTube videos, blog posts, q&A's, free live workshops you can join (you can request live captioning), emails they can send (if you want) a wiki, and so on. They got workshops on all kinds of topics!!
So whatever ends up working for your brain. It also has a matching app.
If you lost Mint this year they have a gajillion things for moving from Mint.
Also they have a "got five minutes?" Page which has a slider so you can decide how much attention/time you have before going on lol:
They only have 4 rules of the budget, they're simple and practical, and it doesn't get judgey or like...mean about your spending.
1. Give every dollar a job 2. Embrace your true expenses 3. Roll with the punches 4. Age your money.
THEN THEY BREAK THESE DOWN INTO SMALL STEPS FOR YOU! They even have a printable! Also these rules are great because there's built in expectations that things WILL HAPPEN and it's NOT all or nothing with a fear of total collapse into failure. Reality and The Plan don't always align, especially if you have ADHD. So it's directing our energy towards the true expenses and not clinging to The Plan!! over reality.
You can automate a lot of shit (you can sync with your bank accounts just like mint, but also automate tagging the categories of regular expenses/transactions). And if for whatever reason you accidentally do something that makes the budget look weird or wrong:
A) you can usually fix it somehow OR b) they have like, a button you can press that gives you a clean slate and archives the previous version of the budget for you.
So if you forget for a few weeks or months, or accidentally input something wildly wrong, or just don't want to look at a really terrible month anymore and feel like you need a fresh start you can usually either fix it or start fresh which is really nice.
The app also (for whatever reason) scratches my itch to have things like...have incentives or little game-like goals in a way mint never did? I don't know why. Filling up the bars or putting money into the categories to cover my expenses is satisfying lmao. You can also make a big wish expense category for all the fun shit you want, and fund it whenever you can and then you can see the little bar go up and that's fun.
Anyways I've been using it for like 6+ months now and I think it's really helped me when I use it.
Also!! If anyone starts the trial bc of this post and wants help or gets stuck or whatever (and you don't want to use the YNAB wiki/videos/podcasts/learning sessions)
you can msg me for my discord! and I'll try and help. I definitely spent some time noodling around figuring things out when I first started. The resources and walkthrough helped me, but sometimes u wanna phone a friend, yanno?
It's also possible for me to make a manual budget file for examples/playing around with so we don't have to use/share any real numbers (or obviously real info). I can just grab like, a refinery29 money diary to play with lmao.
(I'm not 100% sure but I think there's also a dedicated ADHD YNAB fan group on Facebook? It's been awhile since I checked. But I think I joined it?)
#looks like it's not a predatory free trial either!#you only get charged if you subscribe after your free trial#which is really nice
Thanks for pointing that out, yes!!! this is true!!!
They do NOT auto-charge after the Free Trial ends. (Signing up via a 3rd party app may still take your card info like any other app download does, but I don't think it auto-charges.):
Text: One week before your trial ends:
- ✉️ We will send a reminder before your trial expires.
Day 34:
- ⌛️ Free trial ends. No need to cancel! You won’t be charged unless you subscribe*
-🙌 Select a subscription plan to keep improving your financial future.
*when you sign up directly through YNAB; third-party app stores may require credit card information when signing up for a trial.
YNAB will send you a reminder your trial is coming to an end, and then on Day 34, they don't charge you anything until you select what subscription plan you want. And, because it's a budgeting program, one of the first things they recommend you do during the trial is budget for the potential subscription cost! which is great because a) i literally would have forgotten about the subscription and b.) it made me actually plan ahead to spend the money if I realized I DID want to use it.
I can't remember if it's automatically a category you can fill in when you first log in to set up, or if they have a suggestion to create the category. It's been a minute since I've done it. But I do remember it being mentioned.
OTHER GOOD NEWS:
You get a free YEAR if you are a student (Q: I am a grad student, medical resident, international student, and/or part-time college student. Do I qualify? A: Sure thing! As long as you’re in college, you’re a college student!)
This works even with non-US currencies and Banks. ("Direct import currently supports select US, Canadian, UK, and EU Banks. If you don’t live in any of those regions, File-Based Import works like a charm.")
if you run or work for a non-profit helping w/ financial literacy in underrepresented and marginalized communities, you can apply for the YNAB for Good program which donates free YNAB subscriptions to orgs for giving to people in the community they service.
So, first thing you need to know is that is a very visibly healthy adult green iguana. Every part of the iguana is sharp. The claws evolved to haul a ten pound lizard up a tree. The spines are like tiny icepicks. The tail is a bullwhip. The teeth evolved to shred leaves, but they'll just as easily shred your flesh. Good luck making a healthy adult iguana do anything they don't wanna. That puts us on our first thing to look at- is the animal capable of defense and getting away, physically? Yes, definitely.
Next thing to know is what does a threatened or scared iguana look like? When an iguana is threatened, it doesn't stand on its hind legs like that; it stands on all fours and puffs itself up to look bigger, aggressively bobs its head (note: head bobbing is a behavior used for a LOT of things, it does need context- for example, they also head bob as part of mating displays), there is hissing, there is tail whipping- iguanas are not subtle creatures. None of this is the behavior of an iguana that feels threatened or is being a threat!
So what does standing like that mean? That's just simple reaching. The iguana sees something they want and is attempting to reach it, and what they want appears to be uppies, because they settle into the human's grip immediately.
Then, we see some GREAT handling from the human. There's really great communication happening between the two of them! The person picks up the iguana very securely- pelvis and pectoral girdles are well supported, and he doesn't grab. (Iguanas typically do NOT like being grabbed around the sides; many of their predators are birds and coming at them from above or gripping the sides is scary!)
As he goes in for the pet, he lets the iguana support their back half on his knee. The hold is secure but not tight; at any point, if the iggy was distressed, they could leave. But they don't- instead, you see them leaning into the pets, actively participating in the behavior. They're not even closing their eyes to block stimulus. They want this to happen.
This is the kind of bond that's possible when you can prove to a big lizard that you're trustworthy, and easily the best iguana video I've seen in a long time. Thank you for tagging me in!
Some green iguana body language resources under the jump!
Barten 2003. Green Iguana Management and Husbandry. Iguana: Journal of the International Iguana Society. I refer to this guy a lot when thinking about iguana behavior because even though the Green Iguana Husbandry issue of Iguana came out 22 years ago, Steve is a member of my herp society and has forgotten more about iguanas than any of us will ever know.
Burghardt 1977. Social behavior in hatchling green iguanas: life at a reptile rookery. Science.
Yes, Burghardt's iguana stuff is older. Yes, it's still highly relevant in the world of reptile ethology. If you can get your hands on a copy of Iguanas of the World, it's amazing how well it holds up.
Kaplan- everything on anapsid.org is at least 10 years old, but that doesn't change how valuable some of it is. Melissa knows her stuff, she just can't have iguanas anymore and unfortunately her health interferes a lot with what she wants to do.
Behavior article collection
Change-Related Stress in Green Iguanas and Other Reptiles
Interpreting Non-Breeding Behaviors in Green Iguanas
Testosterone, Aggression, and Green Iguanas
Köhler 2003. Green Iguana Communication. Iguana: Journal of the International Iguana Society.
Rice et al. 2022. Heads Nods and Boat Bobs: Behavior of Iguana Iguana Is Affected by Environment and Boat Traffic in Riparian Tropical Forest. Biotropica.
Darren Naish wrote a cool blog post for Tetrapod Zoology that's got a lot of social behavior observations! His blogs are always backed up with great sources and evidence.
