Steamshovelmama @steamshovelmama - Tumblr Blog

Posts

k-dhd

vintagegeekculture

David Gerrold called it.

nb-nightwing-deactivated2022111

they posted a full version lol it's mr Stacy's dad for me

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

sometimes I think about how brussel sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collard greens, savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan are all the same species, and i understand why biologists are constantly furious about taxonomy

peppermint-madness

I’m sorry what

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

same species. same fucking species

sztefa001

Somebody please explain this because what the fuck

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

i can do that!

Introducing the Brassica oleracea, a plant species whose cultivars include…all of the above. They all originated from the same plant aka THIS FUCKER!

No, really. This thing has existed in Europe for thousands of years, during which time different societies had different culinary preferences, leading them to selectively breed for different traits. For example, a preference for the eating leaves led farmers to select seeds from the plants with the largest leaves, resulting gradually in the development of kale.

The real fun thing is, this happened on a vast timeline. Kale was developed over 4000 years ago, while Savoy cabbage was first documented just 5 centuries ago. And different cultivars developed in different regions across Europe and Asia, with their phenotypes and names changing wildly over time. (Fun fact, Brussels sprouts are indeed named for Brussels, the capital city of Belgium, where they were developed from a predecessor imported from Rome.)

The list above isn’t even exhaustive btw. There are plenty of other ridiculous cultivars (such as the Jersey cabbage, pictured below), and there’s no telling how many other forms existed throughout history, and which would have counted as distinct cultivars, and how many names and groups they were separated into, and, and, and—and imposing taxonomy on the real world is a mess, basically, because the real world does not give a shit about making itself comprehensible or categorizeable. But still we try. Planet Earth has Hot Mess Energy, and would you really have it any other way?

ko-fi

bm-pancake

Also the reason they’re considered the same species is because if you try to crossbreed them they will produce viable and fertile offspring

Plants are insane that way

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

Introducing Kalettes (kale-brussels sprouts hybrid), Broccoflower (broccoli-cauliflower hybrid), and Broccolini (broccoli-gai lan hybrid)

look at the kalettes! the itty bitty tiny kalettes!!! I absolutely despise this knowledge thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bonus: Romanesco broccoli, which is not a hybrid but just….really fucked up cauliflower

And don’t even get me STARTED on ornamental cabbage. fuck off

steamshovelmama

“You’re born with a ton of fucks to give, so you spend them like a kid with a credit card. You give fucks about your friends, about your grades, about your fashion sense, about strangers’ opinions. You give way too many fucks about way too many things. You have so many. Then, as you get older, you have maybe 10 fucks per month, so you learn to budget them. You allocate fucks to family and career, but there aren’t enough fucks to give to the newest fads. Oh, someone at work has something they need my help with that’s outside my job title? I’ll do my best to allocate some fucks, but this month is pretty tight. Then, as you get even older, you’re down to 1-2 fucks per month, and those fucks are pretty damn precious. You give them to your family and your hobbies and your job, and that’s kinda it. It’s not your fault – fucks expire too quickly. I would’ve liked to save my fucks from when I was younger but I can’t. Then, you hit fuck insolvency. You’re getting like 1 fuck a year, and you have to make it last. So you go without, and even previously fuck-worthy things, you just can’t give a fuck. Some people run out really quickly, Some people have a fuck trust fund that pays out a decent amount even into old age. But at some point, the fuck faucet runs completely dry and you’re out of fucks to give. It’s just basic Fuckonomics.”

—

-Unknown English Teacher (via swarthyvillain)

I’ve never read anything more fucking true in my whole fucking life.

Fuck.

(via unicornempire)

thewritershandbook

Types of Ships

Parts of the Ship

Wind Directions

Sides of Boats

note-a-bear

MOTHERFUCKING SHIP SHAPE

drst

WHERE WAS THIS 5 YEARS AGO WHEN I NEEDED IT TO WRITE THAT NAVAL BATTLE SCENE?

darthmelyanna

WHERE WAS THIS 5 YEARS AGO WHEN I EDITED THAT NAVAL BATTLE SCENE?

janeymac-ie

Where was this two years ago when I read some Aubrey and Maturin books?

steamshovelmama

Hornblower fic here I come!

pipistrellus

the ao3 discourse is interesting to me bc i feel like theres a big disconnect between ppl who Were There For Strikethrough of course but also in a more general way, people for whom Strikethrough was not a Weird Anomaly – people who grew up in the late 80s/early-mid 90s climate of BANNING JUDY BLUME BOOKS FROM LIBRARIES BC AN ADULT WROTE TEENS DOING SEX ! and stuff… like… ppl for whom “disingenuous right-wing ~for the family~ morality org claims to wanna protect vulnerable people but SOMEHOW MIRACULOUSLY ends up just banning kids from reading about sex or gay shit or talking about having been raped” is really… just… the norm. like. thats the baseline of this discourse… that’s… you know. i dont know. i dont mean this in a YOU GOTTA UNDERSTAND WHERE WE WISE OLD PPL ARE COMING FROM thing i mean it in a … i genuinely think that there are two paradigms here and that it is probably hard to grok aspects of them if you grew up in a cultural atmosphere which can lead you to claim ~Strikethrough was an anomaly~ rather than the system working as intended. Strikethrough wasnt a Good Protective Thing which ON THE EDGES also ACCIDENTALLY took out a FEW “innocent” comms and journals… Strikethrough did what it was intended to do, and it was only one incident in a long, looooong history of organizations like that one doing, or trying to do, the same damn thing,

feanna

Yeah, fandom was weird thing to be into (and not the kind other people find endearing), and definitely UNDERGROUND. You had to definitely go looking. And while not everybody elses weird stuff in fandom was your weird stuff, you were all the target of “normal” people together. AO3 was revolutionary!! I remeber when it was first posed as an idea. Also, I still remeber the women, who had a physical zine shipped to Germany and had to go to customs where they told her they check magazines so people don’t order porn, not that she (women) would!!! (Yeah, that K/S zine had some explicit gay art in it, she was lucky they didn’t actually look inside.) So that’s also were people are coming from. When I got into fandom, there was still a BIG Het/Slash divide, and Slash was a warning! (and slasher and identity). Not to say that everything was better, or something. But there was always the feeling that you were transgressing in some way by being there. And you knew you weren’t wanted on platforms made for “normal” people. The constant warnings people put on stuff, where “please don’t sue me!” was a real thing, and that adult stuff couldn’t be on many of the pages/archives, and sites that didn’t allow gay content, etc.. We remeber all the things that weren’t allowed to be posted on certain sites, that is why the AO3 even came into being.

medie

Yeah, I got into fandom around the same time. I can remember getting banned off a Sentinel mailing list because I spoke up in defense of a person who’d accidentally forwarded a slash email to the wrong list. (It was an accident and yes they got hardcore yelled at).

I can remember having to mail proof of my legal age to a adult mailing list before I could get in. (Yes they were legit, no it wasn’t an identity scam)

We developed pseudonyms to protect ourselves online because people got fired for being fannish and for writing slash. People got harassed in their offline lives (yep, fandom doxxed long before the word got coined). I can remember some fans having it impact custody battles.

The OTW and the Ao3 rose out of fans basically swearing ‘never again’ because we got so damn tired of being attacked. The Ao3 gave us a place to post, bu the OTW’s advocacy work has done a lot to legitimize fandom.

Sometimes I think we did the job too well, because while it’s gotten better, all that stuff really hasn’t gone away and I worry so much about the kids coming up in fandom now. Throwing around personal details like it’s nbd, pics, whatever.

It can come back to haunt you.

Tag your shit so people don’t have to see it, but lay off the censorship talk. That’s a road you don’t want to go down.

The Ao3 can and will make decisions to protect things you don’t like, sure, but trust me, that’s actually a reassuring thing because ultimately?

They’re also protecting you.

cacchieressa

for real though, speaking as someone who was actually personally affected by Strikethrough - I did have fic that was posted only to a targeted community (pornish_pixies) deleted when Strikethrough happened and I had to repost to my own LJ (and later to AO3) to ensure I could archive them and they wouldn’t just disappear again - the WHOLE POINT OF OWNING THE SERVERS IS SO THAT YOUR WEIRD STUFF WON’T GET DELETED because of some homophobic crusade masquerading as ~protecting the children~. And also, the whole point of tagging and warning is so that people who don’t want to see your weird stuff can scroll or filter, and people who do want to can find it.

steamshovelmama

Yes. This.

I date from the era of printzines when slash was seen as somehow much nastier than the het stuff and *boy* was that a huge divide in fandom! But, yes, you had to prove you were of age to get a lot of fanzines with explicit stuff in… (of course, now *het* is the one seen as perverted and nasty so *headdesk*)

I was also on usenet - I was there for the Due South Ray Wars and was part of X Files fandom. Back then, fandom wasn’t just a mildly-off-the-wall minority hobby that the mundanes smiled about in a patronising manner; it was something that was Seriously Weird. Very much along the lines of, “don’t let them near your children,” weird. I am not exaggerating.

I was on lj for Strikethrough and while I wasn’t affected I saw the communities we’d started to establish there completely rocked. It wasn’t just that it came out of the blue and absolutely had a right wing christian motivation* but that when we tried to get clear guidelines on what we were safe to post and what would get us banned Six Apart refused point blank to talk to us or to provide a list of no-nos. Most of us would have happily kept the content on lj within the rules - if only they’d tell us what the rules were!

That’s why it became important to have an Archive Of Our Own (think about that name and what it means!) So that members of our community could make the rules.

*the RW christian thing. People excusing strikethrough point out that the journal was trying to purge sites with child porn content and caught a load of stuff by accident. The problem with that analysis is that it ignores the fact that to RWC groups a sin is a sin is a sin. There is no hierarchy of sins so homosexuality is seen as no more or less sinful than sexual activity with a child. They are both sins of lust “misplaced”onto an inappropriate non-reproductive object. Yeah, I know, *gag*. But it’s true.

Suggesting the complaints did not deliberately target LGBT material, but was about child protection, is to willfully ignore the way these groups see no difference between the two.

steamshovelmama

Reblogging this from years ago because the calls to control content on AO3 seem to have got stronger. And I still don't agree. (At this point someone usually pops up to claim that certain topics *should* be controlled. Sometimes it's racism, sometimes it's homophobic material, sometimes it's underage sex - you name it, someone wants it off AO3.

I'm old enough, and know enough history, to say "No." Because it may start with the purest intentions - but it won't stop there. Who gets to decide which material is beyond the pale? Who gets to decide that? Who would *you* trust to make those decisions? Until you have a coherent answer to that, I'm sticking with no censorship.

mimezzi

ninth house bitches!

[instagram & twitter]

#gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth

kavinskhhy

art by CaioSantons

steamshovelmama

Gorgeous!