somewhere to be

asch || sol [he/him] 🌌 this is all you have, but it’s still something.

[streetsandsodiumlights]

Asch || Sol ✨

he/him ⭐️ 28

writer, artist, plural system! not much original work here im afraid, just the things that make us happy.

things you may find here: various things. faves atm include the archive undying, honkai star rail, dragon age (although I couldn’t finish veilguard 😔), witch hat atelier, warframe, aaaand probably a lot of other other random stuff. see below for the sideblogs I use to quarantine things like warframe and dragon age

other interests: houseplants <3

dms are open if anyone wants to chat :) we’re friendly I promise.

byf: no syscourse. i will tag things on request, just send me an ask. my inbox is always open even for small talk; i like to chat!!

dragon age @riftsmagic

warframe @cephalon-celaeno

sunless skies @starseared

system blog @sunlessys

[so-much-for-subtlety]

some kind of amphibious two-stroke engine

[wumblr]

the student said, "i'm reading a zen buddhist cookbook. with no recipes." and the teacher replied, "ah, dogen's instructions for the cook, written in 1237?" "yeah," said the student, "it's saying not to let rats fall into the rice pot"

[wumblr]

letting rats fall into the rice pot violates the buddhist concept of nonviolence, ahimsa. and this is one of the more dauntingly advanced cookbooks i've ever seen

ingredients: 1 grain of dust.

step 1 turn the Wheel of Reality within the grain of dust

[elodieunderglass]

Oh I see what you mean!

I felt like I was keeping up here:

A rich buttery soup is not better as such than a broth of wild herbs. In handling and preparing wild herbs, do so as you would the ingredients for a rich feast, wholeheartedly, sincerely, clearly.

But then I realise the very next sentence that I’m not even remotely on their level:

When you serve the monastic assembly, they and you should taste only the flavour of the Ocean of Reality , the Ocean of unobscured Awake Awareness, not whether or not the soup is creamy or made only of wild herbs.

There’s a lot I don’t know about soup.

[redavexat]

[everyday-cutephoto]

[draconym]

I've probably posted about this before but it still gets me that Ripley (my parrot) has a special nickname for my spouse, Tev. Like he knows and uses the names of everyone in his flock (me, Tev, Steve, and Cheese. also a couple of our friends and my mom's dog) but because Tev calls him "Ripley buddy," a couple years ago Ripley started calling him "Tev buddy" instead of just Tev. He doesn't call anybody else buddy. He knows that 'buddy' is a special suffix for him and Tev to use with each other's names because they love each other. Doesn't that just melt your fucking heart

[draconym]

They love each other

[wizardarchetypes]

(guy who isnt beating the ocd voice) i know! maybe if i spend all night ruminating on something i feel guilty about until i’ve considered it from every possible angle and made myself physically ill, then i can finally forgive myself and i’ll feel better! 99% of morally abhorrent people stop self punishing right before they’re Absolved

[wizardarchetypes]

hi this tag is making me insane. OCD treatment and recovery are notoriously difficult because you have to give up all of your comforts and accommodations you've created, to actually lay the beast bare. i often say "the only way out of OCD is through" but i think this tag is far more evocative of what it actually feels like to find the strength within you to face recovery.

[datsderbunnyblog]

This comment was left on a post about making the most of the Libby app. "Excessive use of generous lending policies" is the most absurd phrase I've ever seen anyone use to discuss libraries.

[catboycommunist]

evergreen

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

looked up Heidi because I'm a journalist

for reasons I can't imagine this publisher of sexless Alaska love stories is averaging under 20 likes each on posts about her books, so if I can be so honest I kind of have my doubts that her books are getting read even with the excessive use of generous lending policies

[ariaste]

Also her claim that authors are not getting paid per borrow is.... wrong. With ebooks (which is what she's talking about here with Libby) there are two forms of licensing for libraries to lend out ebooks.

The first kind is that they buy a license for a pre-determined amount of check-outs. I'll just make some numbers up for the sake of illustrating what that looks like: Let's say $20 for 20 borrows. When the ebook has been checked out 20 times, the library has to renew the license and pay more money in order to continue lending out the ebook. The author gets a cut of that $20 as their royalties.

The second kind is literally paying per borrow. (Again just making up numbers here) Let's say the library pays 50 cents every time the book is checked out. The author still gets a cut as their royalties. Is it just 10 or 20 cents per borrow? Yes, but that adds up! AND it means that people who otherwise wouldn't have been able to read my book at all are able to read it, which is great! AND it means that the library is thriving and being used, which is also great!

So yes, authors DO get paid from library activity!!!!!!

Do not feel guilty for using the library. I don't know one single author (except this Little Miss Ma'am in the screenshots, apparently) who would resent their readers for using libraries.

[escuerzoresucitado]

Common tree shrew

[miiilowo]

you lost yourself to the woke agenda. Stop being a trans man and go back to a cis man

I don't know what to add in response to this ask it's perfect on it's own. I don't want to soil it

[dogpuppy]

[mandywondering]

I mean, in some very interesting Technically Correct ways, they didn't actually die? Now, they're very much no longer alive. But the forces involved are such that they didn't get any of the usual cellular processes of death, they simply went from biology to physics in less time than it takes a signal to travel down your optic nerve.

[dietspam16]

if you go from biology to physics without dying first you don’t go to heaven the uber driver went over this already

[valtsv]

I love your "they ring the same bells for weddings and funerals" tag bc I work as a bell-ringer at one of the few churches in my city where you still have to ring the bell manually. and we do ring the same bell whether it's a wedding or a funeral! but ☝️ we also ring it if the local sports team wins at sports (the secret third thing that is neither a wedding nor a funeral)

the three universal human experiences: love, death, and sports

[short-for-melancholy]

[redstonedust]

the whole "insulting someone based on their appearance is bad because it could indirectly hurt people you like who share that feature" is a good start for unlearning body shaming but i do think we need to go further and remind people that even if there was some physical trait that was magically 10000% exclusive to conservatives and creeps and nobody else ever had it, we still shouldnt be insulting them based on that. because the problem with them is not their appearance its their ideology and actions. by insulting their appearance you arent just indirectly insulting others who look like that, youre literally not making the correct point. stay on topic ya know.

[bikananjarrus]

having a girl blorbo is like. i need to cocoon her in blankets and let her sleep until noon. i need to cook her three square meals a day so she’s not just living off coffee and the will of god. i need to see her wrestle a pig in the mud. i need to turn her into a keychain and swing her wildly around on my backpack. i need to give her a sword and set her loose. i need to steam her like a vegetable in my rice cooker. i need to grind her into dust with a mortar and pestle and turn her into sand art and display her on my shelf. i need to give her smoochies and kisses. i need to wear her in a locket that’s discovered with my corpse thousands of years later. i need to create a new constellation in her image. i need to cover her in blood.

[galileosballs]

Also, please do not listen to how people talk about cover letters on this site. Cover letters are important, and in many industries you can be damn sure they'll be read. And no, they're not 'fanfic about working in your office', or just re-stating the resume contents in a fancier guise. If you treat them like that, then of course they're not doing much for you. That makes you sound like a syncophantic windbag, and it's not doing anything else to help.

I was trained in the dark arts of the cover letter by my mother, who is a hiring manager. And her training has paid off: I've been consistently told my cover letters are excellent. Let me pass on the wisdom.

The job of a cover letter is to give a prospective employer strictly more information than is on the resume. This is where you take the resume contents and put them into context. You look at the job requirements (you are looking at the job requirements before applying, right?) and look at your resume and ask the question (in your head) "why would a person think this candidate would be good for this job?" and your cover letter is the answer to that question. If you don't answer that question, the hiring manager is going to have to do it themselves, and you have way more information to work with than they do.

This is especially important if you're moving from one industry to another, because then the relevant connections aren't obvious. It's also very important if you're overqualified, because then you can use the letter to say "I know it looks like this job would be too entry-level for me, but I'm interested to pursue it for reasons x, y, and z". You can also use this space to explain away something that might otherwise be disqualifying, like job-hopping or a long break in employment. The tone to strike here is always matter-of-fact and constrained to topic - don't go into detail about health stuff or personal tragedy, just tell them what they need to hear: that this period of your resume was affected by [bad thing] but that it's now in the past and you're looking forward to the next chapter. Remember, one of the things they're trying to learn is whether you'd be content in this role, or whether you'd be miserable and leave after 2 months, which would force them to do all the work of hiring again. You're trying to establish that you will fit right in and not cause problems. Knowing what drew you to this job in particular (and don't just say 'money', that's true for everyone) helps with that.

And the other mistake? Everyone writes cover letters that are too long. One page is fine. Two is the absolute maximum, and that's if you have a lot of specific things to say. It's a waste of your time and theirs to pad it out with fluff. Of my two most recent successful cover letters (i.e. jobs for which I was interviewed) one was 390 words and the other was 550. That's the length of this post. How long did it take me to write this post? About 15 minutes to write, 5 to proof and edit. That's how long you should be spending on a cover letter, maximum.

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[sinnegantheworm]

here's my super-quick, easy-to-digest summary that i use when i can't spend more than like 15 seconds on it but need someone to know the basic distinctions:

generative AI - bad evil AI. chatbots, LLMs, image generators, etc. this the one that steals shit.

analytical AI - helpful medical AI. this the one that helps detect cancer early.

game "AI" - fake AI. 100% human created and dictated. this the one that determines game mob behavior n stuff.

[resemblingthegrave]

losing the battle with my own self-control so will briefly comment and say that categorizing certain types of ai as straightforwardly good and other types as "bad evil," even for the sake of summary, doesn't really hold water. just to give two counterexamples to the distinctions drawn above, large language models ("evil") are being used by human rights groups to parse huge datasets about police abuse while analytical ai ("helpful") is also the kind of ai that animates facial recognition software and the increasingly ubiquitous searchable license plate databases that police are using to stalk people. the goodness or badness of a given ai tool has less to do with its type and more to do with things like scale and scope, transparency, ownership, and contextual application.

[beemovieerotica]

please vote for tylenol to have her face on a beer can $1 for 1 vote and the donation goes to the baltimore animal rescue and care shelter

[reversalsun]

TYLENOL HAS MADE IT INTO THE TOP TEN LETS FUCKING GO

[beemovieerotica]

VOTE NOW SO WE CAN SEE TYLENOL'S FACE ON BEER CANS IN THE DITCHES BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD!!!

[reversalsun]

If you all will allow me a moment to analyze the competition as it exists, there's something interesting going on with the numbers.

As we all know, thanks to the support of the good people of Tumblr, Tylenol has experienced a meteoric rise to second place. Even though her competition is stiff, I believe in Tylenol's ability to go the distance.

But let's take a look at the competition:

Elmer seems to be a lovely boy. I have no qualms with Elmer, and think he would look fantastic on a beer can. But what about Elmer's campaigns? Who is the power behind the throne here, and how have they managed to find such breakout success on this competition?

A handful of wealthy donors are trying to buy this competition.

At the end of the day, all donations are good donations here. This is a charity event so every penny earned is going to help animals in need. But it's not lost on me that Elmer's current ranking is thanks entirely to a few individuals with the financial means to put their thumbs on the scale.

Tylenol's donors, comparatively, are small and numerous, mostly $1-10 donations from many passionate believers in what she stands for (autism and pain relief I think).

Overall, the donations tell a very different story than what the base ranking shows you. Elmer is held aloft by just 24 donors and bolstered by a few wealthy patrons, whereas Tylenol has won the hearts of literally hundreds of people. Even the current third place, Abby, owes her ranking to numerous small contributions rather than one or two large ones.

Tylenol is the people's princess.

[beemovieerotica]

Tylenol is the people's princess