almost home
occasionally subtle
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
No title available
Monterey Bay Aquarium
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
ellievsbear
YOU ARE THE REASON
Product Placement
Peter Solarz
if i look back, i am lost
NASA
#extradirty
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Janaina Medeiros
DEAR READER
Keni
pixel skylines
trying on a metaphor
i don't do bad sauce passes
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@storiesintheashes
reasons to switch from the automobile to the helicopter as society's main mode of transportation
it is dramatically more complicated and will make transit harder
many more fatalities will occur
offering the required training will cost us unfathomably
everywhere would be insanely loud 24/7
500% increase in fossil fuel emissions
you can rappel out of them
Perihelion: I like being the biggest, smartest, most dangerous thing around. Being the biggest, smartest, most dangerous thing around makes me good at my function: protecting my crew and helping them complete missions. I care deeply about my crew, who trusts me to fulfill my function with the immense power I have. Because they trust me, I can banter with my crew in ways that would terrify outsiders. Terrifying outsiders amuses me and I will take every opportunity to do so. If they can't handle it, then they can't handle the mission. I don't care what their past experiences are. Trauma? Skill issue. Get over it.
other PSUMNT machine intelligences: We are also huge and smart and good at our jobs. Stop being weird.
Perihelion: >:(
Random rogue SecUnit: I'm often the biggest, smartest, most dangerous thing around and this causes me enormous amounts of stress. You scare the shit out of me but that's nothing new, so honestly fuck you. Here's a compilation of what the extensive amounts of brain torture I've endured feels like. Chew on that, asshole. Oh btw, despite being an anxious, traumatized mess, I'm extremely good at and dedicated to my function: protecting my clients. The very idea that I might snap and hurt the people I've come to care about is so distressing that I'm risking my life and using my newly acquired freedom to find out whether I can be trusted or not. I'll let you do painful experimental surgery on me to help me even though you're the most dangerous thing I've ever met, because while you were using my brain to watch hundreds of hours of TV with me I realized you're really a big softy. Like me. But don't you dare try to talk to me about my feelings.
Perihelion: ...
Perihelion: Please take my phone number.
Duck and Fakir, made for a Princess Tutu zine 💙
@princesstutuzine
When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.
Source: Utah Division of Wildlife Resources / USDA Wildlife Services
Sherlock Holmes having a universal ace experience -- expressing disinterest and immediately getting called an inhuman robot.
#images#sherlock holmes#sorry i don't turn rabid and marry the prettiest girl in sight at the push of a button my dear watson
Watson is like "of course I proposed marriage to a girl I met two days ago, I'm normal and make rational decisions"
#I read this part just the other day#He literally proposes within two days it’s crazy
Every Sherlock Holmes remake that tries to make Watson the straight man does him a great injustice. Mfer is a total madlad. Everyone's like "oh he's not addicted to hard drugs and doesn't do chemistry experiments in his bedroom for fun" there are subtler ways to be completely unhinged.
The thing is, Watson may or may not instigate the Situations & Shenanigans, but he voluntarily spends most of his Sherlock Holmes, who DOES!
““Normal”“ people do not do that.
Watson will show up at Holmes' place and be like "are you doing any investigations of super weird shit today" and Holmes will be like "yes I am cornering this dangerous mass murderer, you should come and bring your gun in case anyone tries to shoot us" and Watson will do it without question, thinking "I'm so glad he's got something wholesome to distract himself with so he doesn't take more cocaine".
Are you kidding? Poor impulse control, emotional dysregulation, and novelty-seeking - ADHD is what's wrong with Watson and Holmes is trying to get him to be reasonable and do cocaine about it.
just saw a 'comments' tab on someones blog you know where the following and likes tabs would be if enabled and it was just showing all the replies theyve made on peoples posts. this is fascinating when did this feature come out
EMERGENCY - ITS AUTO ENABLED!
if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.
if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to
PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply
figured i'd get the word out bc i have not seen a single mention of this and i'm sure there are plenty of people who maybe comment on things they don't want on display for everyone to see on their blog lol. you can still look at your replies with it toggled off just no one else can, like locking the following and likes list
I believe it's only auto-enabled if you were already sharing your likes. If you had like sharing turned off, reply sharing should (should) also be turned off.
Probably best to still check, though.
Yeah, my likes were off so my replies aren't shared.
Growing up I used to talk shop with my father about superheroes. He grew up in the 60s, and he watched the DCAU justice league cartoon with us when we were growing up. And one thing he mentioned stuck out to him was that in the 60s, basically everyone in the League was, in their solo books, The Hero. There was no speciation in personality because in the context of each individual solo book the speciation was between The Hero and whatever the personalities were amongst their supporting cast. His experience was that each of the headliners were just running HeroPersonality.exe, Flash was Green Lantern was Superman- and the consequence of putting all of them in an ensemble was, in his words, like having Six Supermen. He credited this with his shift towards Marvel, where he felt like there was more of a draw to seeing two different headliners teaming up with each other- it's not just going to be two Supermen in the room with each other, Spidey has a meaningfully different outlook from the Fantastic Four and so on. This was truthy, filtered through his perceptions of his own childhood, and now you're getting it third hand through my perceptions of my childhood- but, you know. I've read silver age stuff. This doesn't seem wrong.
Anyway, what this led into was his assessment of the DCAU justice league roster, where he said that it felt to him like they were doing the work to make sure that you couldn't just use these people interchangeably in each other's beats, giving them specific personality quirks that didn't map to anything he recalled reading their books growing up (pos). Which led into his assessment of the Flash, and how he could see the exact chain of logic that produced DCAU Flash's personality. Because if you need to create seven distinct personalities, probably you need one who's the dedicated comic relief. And if you need to solve the classic problem of preventing a guy with super speed from just immediately solving every single problem, the path of least resistance is to give that story-breaking power to a guy who is, if not God's Perfect Idiot, at least God's Perfect Selectively-Attentive Class Clown. In a vacuum the prospect of tripping a speedster is eye-roll-inducing. But it's at least emotionally plausible when someone manages to trip DCAU Wally West.
"Beleaguered" is a wonderfully expressive word. I am beset by troubles so manifold that they have formed a league. I am playing host to a diplomatic summit of the United Nations of Fuckery, and negotiations are not going well.
When a tiny little frog wants to cheer you up, things will be okay after all 🐸💚💖❤️🩹
Does it count as 'sword in the stone' if it looks more like 'sword in the cairn'...?
king of lounging aroundddd
I love AUs that make lies or misunderstandings true, so pray consider with me an AU where Laurence IS Emily’s bio dad. Maybe he met Jane after they were both involved in some action and then he finds himself tripping into some good old premarital sex and he can’t even REGRET it because she’s fierce and hard and when she tells him what to do it’s really much easier to just do what she says. (We all know Sub Will is true I trust)
And they keep up a correspondence even while they can’t see eachother often and before Will knows it he’s organizing his plans to court her and introduce her to his mother and—
Jane mentions the pregnancy offhandedly, with a complaint about the back pain this kid is already giving her and it had better be a girl, so help her.
Laurence’s brain fully crashes. Riley has to come check on him after a while and finds him having a nervous breakdown over course charting because now he has to find a way to get to Jane’s covert before she has the baby (“I don’t even know how far along she is, Tom,” he despairs, as if that’s the main point and not the fact that he’s like three seconds away from either commandeering the whole ship or deserting his post.). If he just gets there before the baby comes he can convince her to get married (he has no illusions that he will have to convince her, but he was expecting to be able to have a long and amicable courtship to do so!!!)
Riley manages to convince him to talk to their commanding officer. Everyone is very understanding about needing to make sure the kid that comes is legitimate. Arrangements are made while Laurence is vibrating in the corner. He does manage to have the sense to send word ahead to Jane so he’s not just bursting up to the covert doors and embarrassing her.
Convincing her to marry him is grueling. Jane genuinely doesn’t see the need to, but when he desperately points out that this way the baby will be able to visit his family openly and he’ll be able to provide for her if something should happen to either of them, she does agree—on the condition that he’s not to be Weird About It and try to turn her into a Proper Wife and all that or make her move in with his family or something. And of course if the baby is a girl he’s NOT going to interfere with her becoming Excidium’s captain in the future. Will is like yes okay I will come stay with you at the covert when I’m not on the sea just PLEASE marry me. My mother is already going to be upset that I couldn’t follow the thirty step courting plan we came up with I MUST give her the satisfaction of our at least being married before the babe comes. And Jane is like well thank god I don’t have to deal with a THIRTY STEP COURTING PLAN THEN.
They’re married in short order and Lady Allendale doesn’t chew Will out too much about getting a woman pregnant before they’re married. Excidium is still a bit iffy about this whole marriage thing but he supposes that it at least makes more children more likely.
And Emily is born and Will immediately falls in love. That’s his daughter!! His baby girl!! He goes back to his ship delirious with love.
And now come the complications such as: Will now knows information about the corps that a lot of people would really prefer he not know! They keep the Longwing captains secret for a reason, and here’s this duty bound Navy guy (derogatory) who could very well decide to get overprotective and block Emily’s future inheritance.
So Jane maybe. Doesn’t really tell anyone that it was a Navy man? And Will just kind of. Presents her as employed by the corps, so people assume she’s a maid or a cook on a covert. This is fine. Everything is fine! Whenever Will’s ship docks he gets to visit his impressive wife and wonderful daughter and uh. Their dragon. Um. He’s still getting used to that part.
After the initial panic and Surge of Love passes Will does have to grapple with his own feelings about not only women serving in the army (which tbf he’s been fairly chill about outwardly), but his daughter specifically serving. He compensates for this by teaching her as much about ships as he can. Look he’s getting such a good grade in Treating His Daughter as An Officer, Jane!!
Jane: :\ Will are you trying to poach our daughter for the Navy
Will, who now has the thought in his head of getting to serve beside his kid: …nnnno?
It’s all good natured though, and they continue in that holding pattern for years as Will moves up the ranks and then, well. The Amitie still happens. Will’s name isn’t put in the lots due to his marriage, but the lots never really mattered in the first place. He still harnesses Temeraire. There’s a good deal less initial fear involved, and Will is able to help mock up a better harness from the start, and he knows a little of how deep the bond between a dragon and their captain is. And he does tell Temeraire, quietly, that his wife is a captain to a dragon herself, and his daughter will be glad to meet him. (Emily is, delighted to have not just one aviator parent but two. Temeraire is glad to have her on his crew because he can at least trust that there’s someone else that values Laurence like he does. Also she is very good at washing his scales and curls up on his back while Laurence reads to them, so. He approves of this tiny child.)
Will, king of keeping his mouth shut for propriety’s sake, could mention these facts at any point to anyone else to smooth things over. He does not do this. Why would he. He’s pretty openly treating Emily as his daughter but like. He’s also doing the same with the other runners assigned to him. Probably the first anyone hears about it is because Harcourt is obviously wary of him giving her the proper respect, and so he quietly tries to reassure her.
“My wife serves in the corps, and I would be a dreadful husband if I hadn’t learned to cope with her profession, especially considering my daughter will one day take her spot.”
Harcourt connects several dots and says, a little too loud, “You’re married to a Longwing Captain???”
And everyone is like dude what the fuck why didn’t you mention this WHO are you married to
And Emily, who is present because I’ve decided she’s being a very Underfoot Child to her dad since she hasn’t seen him in a while, just kind of goes, “Uh???” And gestures between them. There is, the other aviators note with alarm, a semblance.
“JANE ROLAND?” Someone says incredulously. “SHE MARRIED A NAVY MAN??”
the bad news: I now hate my current wip and strongly believe there isn't a single joke in it that lands
the good news: I know my process enough to recognize this as the slump that I hit in everything I write when it's like three-quarters-ish done
the bad news: the only way out is through
the good news: I do know the way out!
the bad news: yeah but it's through
making a cross stitch that says "I am funny and he would fucking say that" to hang directly above my monitor
"hey toast you stayed up past midnight because you were working on the fic and not because you were procrastinating by making a hideous pattern for a joke cross stitch" have you never met a writer before
gonna tell my kids this was live laugh love
being on doxxing terms with a tumblr mutual is kinda funny like we met at yaoi university and now an year later we both know each other's exact locations
I feel like Apothecary Diaries is exemplary proof that writing quality depends not on which tropes are used, but on how they're used. The yeast of that story ferments on one of the most maligned and frustrating tropes in existence, and yet it's executed so well that the bread is delicious with a nice firm crust.
MaoMao and Jinshi are both intelligent in a lot of ways, including deductive reasoning. So one might expect their repeated misunderstandings or continued blindness toward certain revelations to feel contrived. But they never do, in part because of how brilliantly their characterization was established.
From the first installment, Maomao ponders how "knowing too much" could get her into trouble.
At first her main concern is her own literacy. The ability to read is not a skill most young women of her station possess, and would doubtlessly draw attention. Attention threatens her ability to lay low and wait out her service contract. So she keeps this skill hidden.
And indeed, her concerns are validated by the narrative, because she catches the attention of Jinshi and Gyokuyou—two of the highest authority figures of the rear palace—immediately upon employing her literacy in her effort to warn the concubines of the poisonous effects of the makeup.
This instantly alters the course of her life, a consequence that at first seems positive; after all, personal attendant to a concubine is certainly several steps above the average palace launderess. But these elevated steps bring more attention onto her, and it isn't long at all before the emperor himself is ordering her to perform medical miracles.
Knowledge is power. And as Maomao explains to Jinshi: it's not always about what someone will do with power; it's about what they can do.
So Maomao uses the powerlessness of her station as a shield, and hides behind it by pretending not to know things.
And the way she does this is interesting, in part because she is so good at deduction. Often it comes down to her simply choosing not to pursue a line of thinking, forcefully redirecting her attention elsewhere the moment she realizes that certain lines may connect to form a bigger picture than someone of her station should see.
Maomao is an apothecary. Effectively, throughout the story, she's an herbalist, pharmacist, chemist, physician, dietician, and forensic detective.
At the same time, her primary survival mechanism is avoidance. And this is established very early in her characterization, even before her actual titular passion.
When Maomao, solver of mysterious deaths, worker of medical miracles, foiler of assassination plots, repeatedly fails to connect the increasingly-obvious dots pointing to Jinshi's true identity, it doesn't feel contrived at all; because by the time those dots begin to come to light, the story has already established that it's firmly in-character for Maomao to simply refuse to pick up the pencil if she already knows what picture those dots will form. As long as she doesn't draw those connections herself, she can remain safe in denial.
And that's how Apothecary Diaries turned one of my least-favorite tropes into one of the most compelling parts of its story.
[image description: screenshots of a series of Tweets, transcribed below:]
Joel Burgess (@JoelBurgess) - 2018-08-21, 7:57 AM
Alright, so inspired by @NPurkeypile’s bee post yesterday, here is one of my favorite bits of Skyrim oral history - the myth of the treasure fox.
I’ve told this story before in talks/etc, but I don’t think I’ve shared it with twitter. Here goes.
