if i look back, i am lost
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Origami Around
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Jules of Nature
todays bird
titsay
Mike Driver
taylor price
roma★
𓃗
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official daine visual archive
One Nice Bug Per Day
Cosimo Galluzzi
★
Kiana Khansmith
EXPECTATIONS
🪼
pixel skylines
seen from New Zealand
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Vietnam
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Albania
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Pakistan
seen from Malaysia
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seen from Botswana
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seen from Nepal
@sentryofwords
its not an adhd thing
people keep telling me i do this because i have adhd, but it is literally the most simple algebra and pre algebra concept.
We were all taught to think of numbers like this in school.
7+8 is a simple problem, but when i solve it, it turns into (7-2)+(8+2)=5+10=15
This is a pre algebra concept used to get you thinking of numbers flexibly.
But people keep saying i do this because of adhd.
Thoughts?
Finally finished my attack on TaroTheArtDragon. (OC is Masala Dosa)
hello fellow artists. google has fallen. pinterest/duckduckgo AI filters don't work. do not despair; here is a list i made of places to find reference images without having to sift through piles of worthless garbage. (for future editing convenience i am just linking my blog post on dreamwidth.)
✨ good places to find art reference that are not full of AI trash 🌈
THANK YOU SO MUCH! I have been despairing as it is so hard now to find references and photos of succulents and other things for my designs!! T_T
WIP
a little infrared here, a magic water portal there...
Me: Wow, i should draw!
*goes on my computer and makes a 0 dollar budget sheet for the month*
Thanks ADHD!
grwm for art fight
still recovering from hand strain, but these braces are literally instant relief
Artfight? the hell is a artfight?
Im out here fighting these goddamn fish
FISHFiGHT!
PARIS WAS NOT NAMED AFTER PARIS HILTON YOU DIPSHIT
source?
it was obviously named after Paris, the trojan prince.
A common misconception! Paris Hilton was named after Paris, the Trojan Prince, and Paris (the city) was named after Plaster of Paris, for trade relation reasons (that plaster being the main export f the area when the city was founded).
Plaster of Paris getting its name, of course, from its inventor, Paris Hilton.
I don’t know why anybody uses ChatGPT when they can log into Tumblr Dot Com and see *bespoke* obviously stupid lies, handcrafted by a real asshole for free.
The city was named after Parasaurolophus
I had a really rough time with the flowers
This brought tears to my conservationist heart today.
The continued existence of these species is the legacy of so many people whose names we will never know--some of who never lived to see the impacts of their work.
When you count up the flaws of our species, you have to count the good things too--out of the many species throughout Earth's history that have caused the demise or endangerment of other species, we are the only one that tries to fix it out of our fascination and love for other life forms.
(Big thank you to the anonymous asker who sent this in!)
Earth Day reblog of this thing that made me cry.
And I'll add some other recent good conservation news.
•Green sea turtles are no longer endangered
•Giant pandas are no longer endangered
•Panamanian golden frogs were returned to the wild for the first time since they were wiped out by chytrid 17 years ago
•The Eastern humpback whale population has exceeded pre-whaling numbers and many other whale species are showing strong signs of recovery
•Salmon and bison have been returned to their former habitat in multiple parts of the US through dam removal, habitat restoration, and reintroduction
•The Western monarch migration was up 60% compared to last year
•Galapagos tortoises were reintroduced to Floreana for the first time in 180 years
•Attenborough's long beaked echidna was rediscovered after being though extinct for decades
•Five "lost" island bird species were documented by citizen scientist birders in 2025
Do not stand at my grave and cry. I am not there. I did not die.
So Tolkien never took off?
You mean in the yandere nation AU, right? High fantasy is more popular because it doesn't feel as real. Although Tolkien would have needed some canon explanation for why Gandalf isn't a yandere.
He is lightning
Transparent version.
Theme reveal today!!!!
Voidhead worm
He is lightning
wakes up in a cold sweat
My art fight account!
reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this
I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset
What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know
Mordor.
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
So what is a rain shadow?
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.
my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.
so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.
the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.
also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:
it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.
#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass
On a Watsonian level, sure.
On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.
I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."
I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.
LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)
Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.
#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains
I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:
Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?
I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.
There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.
Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.
(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)
Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.
This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.
LOTR Heritage Post
i think this is coming out
