starlite

She/Her. Making things complicated since before you were born. I write code and I vote.

[catasters]

[sarahseeandersen]

[teathattast]

[tunashei]

I love desire paths. There's something so wonderous about seeing an echo of humanity. Depending on it's location, a desire path can mean so many different things.

In a city, like the pic above, they represent rebellion, and efficiency. The messiness of humanity. We like to imagine we're oh so logical and neat so we design our cities to be logical and neat an then real humans literally trample on that idea. The ego required to think you can design something perfect that checks every box. Life is all about compromise and patching stuff when some new problem arises. Though people have certainly tried! Ohio state univeristy let students carve their desire paths, and then paved them over. It looks pretty artsy.

Some people will try to discourage desire paths, but this is almost always going to fail.

Eventually, people just have to accept them. Humans are too dang stubborn.

Certain desire paths are just adorable. A 0.5 second time saver. You just can't design for maximum efficiency, humans will always find shortcuts!

Though on occasion a desire path can actually be the least efficient way...especially if you're superstitious.

In a wilder area, such as below, they show us the curiosity of humans. A desire path somewhere natural often tells you there's something interesting just ahead. (Though remember some ecosystems are fragile and will suffer if trampled! Stick to paths in these sorts of areas)

And how about desire stairs? I always think these look so cool. We get see humans determination to climb, to traverse every kind of terrain.

And for something really crazy...a desire path used for centuries will create a 'holloway'

All of these pics are off the Desirepath subreddit, check them out for more examples! And many thanks to the users who submitted these photos.

[explodingdog]

[starlite]

(via explodingdog)

[whetstonefires]

One of the most important lessons I ever learned about art was when I became a late addition to the editorial board for the literature part of my high school's lit/art magazine, which nobody ever read.

Because I realized after a couple of meetings that my moments of baffled distress during them were centering around a pattern of our votes electing by majority to reject most of the good, interesting stuff and agree to publish the very bland.

So I was looking around this room of people I mostly liked or respected if not both, trying to figure out what the fuck when there was no reasonable way of asking, until the day we by majority vote sent definitely the best thing submitted all year back pending 'revisions' which of course would not be made, because the poet would definitely either become demoralized or know for damn sure she was too good for our stupid journal. I have no idea which it was; it's a question of mindset, and the submissions were anonymous.

This good poem was rejected for two reasons, both of which were actually manifestations of it being good. One was that it had made a couple of the board uncomfortable--not by having any shocking subject material, mind, just by provoking emotions with unusual descriptive language and indirectness--and they'd transmitted that uneasiness throughout the group during discussion.

And the other, seized upon as an excuse in light of the first, was that by being complex in terms of both structure and notion it had drawn several of us in, interested enough to engage critically and respond in depth, and so we'd marked it up with lots of places we thought a word choice could have been a little stronger, a line break had been a little odd; ways we thought it could have been a more excellent version of the poem we perceived in it. None of them ways it was actually bad. Just places we felt it could have been better.

At the same meeting, we voted to accept a poem that was an utterly tepid rectangle of predictable nothing-in-particular, because no one could find anything in it to object to.

It wasn't good. It wasn't noticeably bad, either, though; it was one consistent level of mediocrity clear through, and thus no part of it stood out as a weakness, and therefore the committee found it more acceptable than the poem that was superior in every way, but which by being daring and interesting had left itself covered in vulnerable places.

The understanding I reached as a result of this experience was multi-layered and difficult to articulate, but the most important part, I think, to share is that the value and quality of a work are not, in fact, very well measured by how many negative things you can find to say about it.

[fairygoulish]

I'm built different. like incorrectly i think

[theclueofthebrokenneedle]

This. Is my pride and joy. A gift for my dad, who played Zork with me when I was a kid, and with his dad when he was a kid. I designed this pattern myself and had a great time puzzling out how to hide the glow in the dark letters!

Pattern: “West of House” by me Fabric: 2x1 on 18ct Blue-Grey Aida Started: 11/27/2021 Finished: 12/25/2021

[myjetpack]

my cartoon for yesterday’s @guardian books

[dayrlbiggins]

you gotta be as gay as possible on the computer otherwise alan turing died for nothing

[citizen-zero]

I feel that today is a good day to post this picture from an ACT UP demonstration at Trump Tower on Halloween 1989 because it is more pertinent than ever

[emmybreese]

🦀🦀🦀

[starlite]

[jonahmagnus]

In world where there is two types of tower-dwellers, a Princess is locked in a tower.

There are two types of tower-people: A Princess, put there to remain pure until marriage or until rescued, and a Wizard, put there by choice to study and learn in isolation. Princesses are defined by their beautiful long hair, and wizards are defined by their beards and impressive 'stache.

There is a Princess, and she lives in a tower. She was put there recently by her mother and father, to keep her pure and untouched until they can secure the marriage to another kingdom and a prince shes never met. She has long, almost brown sandy-blonde hair, pale green eyes and a slim, tender build. She is not the fairest in the land, but she is fair and pretty. If compared to a rose, she would be the humble yet graceful willow tree, slender and tall. She has wanted to be a wizard since a young age, but there is no way for a Princess to become a wizard. Princesses are delicate girls to be protected and sold off until their either dead or Queens or have found True Love.

She used to run the castle halls, stick in hand, robe fashioned out of a delicate silk bedsheet, shouting fake spells at birds while her servants chased her. But as she grew older, her restraints became tighter, and more and more often, she was confined in her room to embroider in solitude with barely the comfort of a window or a maid. The life she is forced into makes her hang her head low, makes her hands be paper-soft, and demands her hair be long and beautiful and perfect like all other Princesses. The world she longed to be a part of was a world of study and experimentation, and as the kingdoms Princess and tool, she could not even dare to hint at her desires into adulthood. She could become a witch, she knew, flee the castle barefoot and sink into the loving embrace of the swamp. But witches don’t live in towers, and they mostly make potions instead of spells, and they don’t grow the flowing whimsical beards that wizards do.

But that does not mean she has to be bored in her tower. Fascinated by magic as she always has been, she arranges with a long string of bribes for books on spells and forbidden potions to be smuggled along with her meals. She studies them while the clock ticks down for either a prince to arrive or her marriage to be finalized. Either one will doom her, and she wants to enjoy herself as much as possible until her marriage. She pours over the books long into the night by candlelight, and all day, she rests her pale, tired eyes. She experiments, and she reads, and she studies non-stop, barely stopping for meals and littering her books with an assortment of food stains. She cuts off her hair to use in bubbling gold potions, her skin becomes scarred with a rainbow of the consequences of failed experiments, and her dresses turn into makeshift cheesecloths and fire-fuel. She washes late into the night after she is done with her work for the day in the darkness, not glancing into the mirror that has become cracked and dusty. When her eyesight starts to fail from strain and working in darkness, she fashions for herself bottle-round glasses, blown by herself in the depths of her tower. Engrossed as she is in her studies, she does not notice the tower warp, and the meals stop rotting, and how she started out in one circular room but now has a loft and a second floor and the fact that the tower seems much much taller then it was originally.

What she DOES notice though, is when brushing crumbs from her face she feels facial hair on her upper lip.

She rushes to the bathroom and thrusts a candle into the holder as she looks at herself. In the dusty mirror, she sees the beginnings of a bushy mustache sit on her upper lip, much further along in growth then be logically possible without her noticing. It’s a pale blonde, like her hair, and she notices faintly that there are streaks of grey in it, a very familiar shade of grey. She brings a trembling hand to her upper lip.

Much, much later, a prince rides up to the tower. It is tall, and warped, and very clearly belonging to a wizard, despite the royal family claiming their daughter lives here.

He shouts up, a bit nervous because of the thorny vines wrapping the beautiful stonework.

“Hey! Does a Princess live here?”

A young man with large bottle glasses and a rather impressive mustache leans out of the tower, his short, sandy-blonde hair spilling lightly in the wind. He starts to say something, then glances back into his house. A smile breaks out on his face as he seems to realize something.

“No!” He shouts back, after a moments hesitation. “But a wizard does!”

[wizard-email]

It's been a while since I've seen new tumblr fairytale :)

[chechula]

Tiny comic I drew to welcome winter two months ago x_x

[chasefoxart]

art museum

[jmfenner91]

[nonasuch]

here is a concept: time travel cop, fish & wildlife division

most of their job is dealing with the kinds of assholes who think black market tiger cubs are a great idea right up until someone gets mauled, except these are even bigger assholes with black market Smilodon cubs that they are even less equipped to care for

this is the most straightforward and therefore relatively headache-free part of their job, because it’s the same “put that thing back where it came from or so help me” song and dance every time

it’s also significantly less depressing than the trophy hunters who don’t even want an alive extinct animal. those are extra annoying because you have to undo the time travel that let them kill that poor Megatherium or thylacine or anklyosaur or whatever, and it’s always so much extra paperwork.

and those people suck, definitely, and have fully earned a stint in Time Jail. no question. but they still do not create anywhere near as much work as the obsessive hobbyists with their exhaustively careful best practices and worryingly good track-covering. also, weirdly, it’s almost always birds with them?

like. the guys who will flagrantly abuse Time Law to bird-nap breeding pairs just long enough to raise one clutch of eggs apiece, and return them seamlessly to their spots on the timeline. who are so determined to keep their pet (ha) projects going that no one even realizes what they’re doing until they have an entire stable breeding population of passenger pigeons up and running. who are now the reason that reps from six different zoos are about to start throwing hands right in front of you over who gets dibs.

those guys cause the most paperwork. and half the time they’re snapped up by the same zoo or wildlife preserve that gets their colony of ivory-billed woodpeckers or Carolina parakeets or — once, very memorably — giant fucking South Island moa, and they never even spend a day in Time Jail.