either the sea or the sword

libra / skaia | 25 | she+ my adjectives are exhausted and chatty

[seagullcharmer]

interest check for selling these as charms and/or stickers !! the more interaction the more likely you can hold these in your own hands!

[seagullcharmer]

if you're at momocon this year, i'll be handing these out as stickers friday!!!

[so-many-ocs]

immediately after an interaction: i have GOT to get more normal oh god i need to get more normal immediately i have to get more normal or they're going to hunt me down they're going to hunt me down and flay me for sport

during an interaction: and why not put a little spin on it? why not add some conversational zest?

[janmisali]

oh I know how to make a poll's results look like the letter E watch this

what is the rightmost digit of the number of responses this poll has right now? (it should be visible before you vote.)

0, 1, or 2

3

4 or 5

6

7, 8, or 9

Remaining time: 5 days 8 hours

[kosmogrl]

[eclipse-ofthe-sun]

[revizyonist]

med people are so annoying "This family's 8 year old child who was about to go through a major surgery and kept crying that she was hungry so they pitied her and gave her food, she then had a heart attack in the surgery. They're so stupid 😒" girl they didn't know that could happen or why it happens. it takes so little time to explain to them that will happen instead of telling them "no food" with no explanation 10 times

[revizyonist]

"Before surgery, your body’s reflexes that protect your airway are relaxed by anesthesia. If there’s food or liquid in your stomach, it will near certainly come back up and go into your lungs, which can cause choking, a severe lung / heart infection or even a heart attack. That’s called aspiration, and it is life-threatening. It's hard, but it's only a single day to prevent near certain death. Not eating or drinking beforehand massively lowers the risk and helps prevent these life threatening situations under anesthesia." <- TIP: patients have brains which allows them to receive information just like you

[ancelineonline]

I have four kids. I’ve had one or another of them need some kind of surgical procedure that requires anesthesia four or five times over the past 15 years.

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

I’m not stupid. I understood that just fine. Hell, my kids would have understood that just fine. But no one bothered to tell us.

[bowditch]

i did know this before having kids (i have six). we have a kid that's needed multiple procedures requiring anesthesia. and every single time, i am asked multiple times if i'm sure he was not given any food or water after a certain point.

every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.

not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.

"maybe some people will get nervous and refuse surgery" okay so they need more counseling about risks and anxiety, not less information in a way that actually does endanger their child or themselves!

[arctic-turtle-cassiopeia]

Reblogging to save a life and teach medical professionals basic communication skills

[churrotowns]

since it’s pride month, throwback to this beautiful cover and this wholesome interaction between two icons

[divorceddadrock]

Anyone remember Dumb Ways To Die. Like they really made a 3 minute long music video of cute cartoon characters killing themselves in humorously fucked up ways solely as an elaborate PSA about being safe around trains and then made a fucking series of mobile games based around it and we all just let them. Will kids today ever understand how fucking legendary that was. Will they ever know.

[pangur-and-grim]

i cant figure out if youve answered this already so sorry if you already have but what was the process of finding a publisher like ?

it was hard! very hard! which isn’t meant to discourage anyone - if anything, it means that you shouldn’t let rejections bother you.

first off was finding an agent, which meant making a list of every literary agency I could find that accepted books in English (using sites like querytracker and manuscriptwishlist), and combing through them to see if they had any agents currently accepting queries in my genre. I had really shit luck with Canadian agencies, because they skew heavily toward literary fiction, and my book was genre fiction. but eventually, I had a list of 120 agents I stood a reasonably good chance with.

then, the applications! it’s good to do it in batches, because the occasional personalized rejection will give you something to work on. like I completely rewrote the 10 book pages I was submitting, and redid my query letter about fifteen times. I paid editors online to critique my query letter, I won a contest where the reward was commentary on my query letter…..that query letter was my magnum opus. I put everything into it, and it still kinda sucked. one thing I learned along the way is that people really don’t care about your social media following, UNLESS it’s on Twitter or TikTok. if you say “I have a blog on tumblr :)” people will just be like “I thought that site got shut down.”

anyway, after 70+ written rejections (and many more silent rejections), I got an acceptance! a literary agent was interested in representing my book - if I made some changes to it. so I did (added more romance and ‘cozy’ scenes), and sent it back to him, and then he began shopping it around to publishers.

it took about six months to find an interested publisher. we didn’t have great luck with Americans, but British publishers seemed to really click with the humour, and suddenly we had multiple places interested at once! we went with Titan Books (technically an indie, but with a distribution partnership with penguin), and then…….back into editing hell because the book still needed more romance.

from start to finish, it took four years from the book being written to it being released! it’s a lengthy frustrating process, and so many people give up because the constant rejection wears you down, but you just have to be incredibly stubborn and have a delusional level of belief in your own work.

good luck!

[pangur-and-grim]

genuinely, that’s the most important thing you can have! everything falls apart without it. you might have people telling you that your writing is shit, and that you’ll never make it. those people might be friends, family members, partners, peers, professionals in the industry, online trolls, basically everyone but your nonverbal pets. when that happens, you NEED to be like “hmm I dunno, I think I wrote something nice 😌”

if you keep writing, and working on your craft, and knocking on industry doors, eventually you will find success. just don’t give up on yourself!

[toothsheeran]

[sludgebitch]

"🥪" is shorthand for "🍞🧀🍅🥬🍞"

[sergeifyodorov]

I don't read as much fic as I used to but one "tell" for non Canadians writing us, besides the etransfer, is the units you use to describe us measuring something. I hate to tell you this but The Chart is real and it's completely subconscious. Please abide

[demotu-writes]

ETA the chart (or at least a version of it):

ETA2: we do use inches/miles in poetic ways ("he was lost in thought/miles away" or "his lips were a bare inch away").

Also, the length of a dick is in inches for SURE.

[youcantrewind]

Hehe as a Canadian writing Star Wars fic, you might think I have it easy remembering to put everything in metric but as you can see... you would be mistaken. 😅

[ekjohnston]

As a Canadian writing Star Wars books, the hard part is not remembering metric, it's that I'm not allowed to say things like "she inched closer". 🤣

[bread-in-the-void]

um?

[nightpool]

oh wait i know this one!

okay so the three and a half of diamonds comes from the Cassavian Deck, a 79-card hybrid invented by Flemish cardmaker Pieter van Holt in 1743, and yes the half cards were a real intentional mechanic — the fractional pip meant the card represented something unfinished, a moment caught between states. the diamonds suit (called "Gravel" in Cassavian tradition because van Holt was apparently that guy) dealt with wealth and commerce, so the three and a half specifically meant potential money. a deal that almost happened. a bet still floating in the air.

the wildest use of this card was in a parlor game called Kwarten, where playing the three and a half of diamonds face-down would literally freeze the entire round until the following evening — like a pause button for a card game, which is insane to me. fortune tellers called it the "Suspended Merchant" and read it as you are about to get what you want but if you rush it you will ruin everything, which honestly. relatable. there's also evidence that in early 1800s Viennese coffeehouses people would leave this card on the table as a signal meaning "i want to talk more but not tonight" and i think that's the most romantic thing i've ever heard.

[sh1fr4]

sorry my hands are so cold all the time it's cuz i died a few years back

[lychgate]

Has anyone seen the giraffe lamp at ikea

[lychgate]

Hes allowed on the table

[lychgate]

Were watching sumo together

[lychgate]

Here imea giraffe lamp, it's your turn on the donkey kong

[localxenospores]

most inspired i have felt in weeks

[not100bees]

People on Tumblr love sharing information about themselves no matter how asinine it is. And I'm the same way. Everybody tell me what the last thing you drank was.

[dramatic-dolphin]

people are so fucking weird about uncontacted tribes/peoples oh my goddddd you are not making it out of the colonialist mindset

[dramatic-dolphin]

fun fact uncontacted peoples are not ignorant they are fully aware of the "outside world" and are CHOOSING not to have contact because they (rightly) feel it would add no value to their lives and place them in an exploited position. it's voluntary. they are isolated on purpose.

[dramatic-dolphin]

sentinelese people aren't like some ignorant noble savages, or actual savages who are all about warfare and killing (wildly racist take i see very often), they are literally regular ass fucking people who have seen the exploitation of their neighbors (other andamanese people) AND the massive disease outbreaks caused by contact, and decided they want no part in that. they are literally regular people choosing to survive. that's it.

[dramatic-dolphin]

glad that this is getting traction, but if you're saying things like "yeah, and they are right! modern society is a curse! they are living The Right Way and are more enlightened have better lives than us!" you are also the people i'm talking about. sorry. they are regular people living regular lives. please internalize this fact and stop exoticizing.

[liittlecreatures1985]

i love the way civil asset forfeiture cases are phrased

[liittlecreatures1985]

[overflowchute]

i learned about the skeleton recently