Asexual and occasionally cool

Em, 30, turns out any pronouns are good for me, asexual and biromantic. Spends too much time thinking about writing fic and no time actually writing any - on AO3 as Emamel

[guerrillatech]

[lemoncat101]

[macbethheadband]

I can tell youre knitting with no love in your heart i can see the hateful intentions in every stitch.

[macbethheadband]

[allatariel]

[thjazispixie]

it is like fucking spot the differences with you people

[thefloatingstone]

Long term injury

[yffresbeard]

i think it is important to recognize the ways in which your favorite thing sucks. i think it keeps u normal

[rabbithaver]

prev im so sorry to put you on blast like this but please know this had me in hysterics

[qqchurch]

the Ice War on Europa...

[qqchurch]

[deep-state-partisan]

[somestrangeangels]

[calcazars]

let it be known that i touch grass frequently and I’m still like this.

[amygdalae]

I absolutely adore dogs but I think dog haters are (usually) more justified than cat haters wrt their reasoning

[amygdalae]

your average cat hater: I don't like how they r bitchy and ignore me/ won't let me manhandle them

your average dog hater: I have been mortally endangered by an ill-trained dog

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

Was talking to a coworker today who explained that her grandfather was like Snow White “but Californian. And an old man.” in that the creatures of the forest would follow him around and presumably duet with him.

“When he died the ravens sat in the trees outside for a week, watching. Taking turns. A horde of raccoons tried to break into the house every night, tearing at the siding. Eventually they gave up, but it was unsettling.”

“Aww. They were checking on him!” I said, like a normal person. Internally, I thought “Maybe you could do the thing you do with dead pets, where you show them to the living pets so the living pet understands they’re gone. But I guess if you did that to a bunch of scavenging species, they’d be like “Well, that’s very sad but he IS food now.” So what you’d need, for human sensibilities, is some sort of transparent corpse barrier. Like a see-through coffin oh that’s what the dwarves were doing! You’ve stopped paying attention to this conversation about the loss of a beloved family member you gotta phase back in.”

[sun-ni-day]

oh that's what the dwarves were doing

[nick-nellson]

Mamma Mia! (2008) dir. Phyllida Lloyd

[somepomegranatetea]

she's platonic about it but in my opinion, stratt 100% treats grace as her dead wife. she keeps a tacky fox trinket in her coat pocket. there's a framed photo of him in her study . he's grinning goofily in it (bc he's a dork). new guy like: is that her husband? / no, dumbass, it's dr. ryland grace, 1/3 of the hail mary mission. / oh, fuck. were they... ? / yeah, it's unclear. black-and-white montages of grace messing around in high-level meetings play every time stratt contemplates committing more environmental crimes. she looks up at the night sky and vaguely wonders if he's enjoying his space ramen. that's her dead wife. she killed him.

[somepomegranatetea]

glad to see we're all on the same page

[serial-unaliver-deactivated2024]

it's kind of crazy climate change has occurred at such a remarkable pace that I and everyone else around my age can remember a completely different climate in our childhoods. I truly watched winter gradually disappear in my life.

[room429]

"You're too young to remember this, but there used to be so many insects outside that you would have to clean them off the windshield after a long car ride" is the kind of sentence that would have been in a cheesy scifi short story earlier in my life, perhaps submitted to a literary magazine and accepted to show support for its environmentalist message - now it's something I've said in earnest.

[sentennial]

three scenes about animals and facing the music

totally unrelated to one another, i’m sure

first two scenes are from the book, chapters 4 and 15, edited slightly for format

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

Split-joint seals (骑缝章qifengzhang)are still widely used on important paper documents in modern China, an anti-tampering technique passed down from ancient times. They are applied across the edge of multi-page contracts, bidding documents and official archives. If any page is removed or replaced, the broken seal pattern can prove the file has been altered.

[ariaste]

OMG I got so excited about this because they used a really similar (though far less refined) version of this for contracts in the European medieval period!

First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!

(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)

Delights me when human beings find similar ways to solve the same problem at two different ends of the world. <3

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

ohhh my god I just fact-checked, Nolan actually DID cut the "Nobody" scene from his Odyssey movie. Mfer that is like cutting the Father reveal from Star Wars. Let me speak in a language you understand this is like not dressing Batman up in his suit. "It was not possible to work it in" the TikTok musical with a budget of $4 and a scratched Hamilton CD managed to work it in in SONG form, step up your FUCKING GAME

[willowcrowned]

tbh I’ve always found it very funny that Elrond is like “there’s no point bringing Glorfindel on the quest, even though he’s a balrog-slayer. You won’t need balrog-slayers” and then thirty pages later they run into a balrog

[willowcrowned]

#and they could’ve really benefited from having a glow in the dark elf in moria (via @emyn-arnens)

obsessed by the implication that glorfindel is bioluminescent

[willowcrowned]

#most elves aren’t #just glorfindel #dwarves on the other hand ARE bioluminescent #but it’s in a spectrum that elves and men and orcs can’t see in #hobbits can see in that spectrum fine #for better mushroom hunting #but they think it’s rude to point out that one of their party members is glowing #and so the dwarves have no idea the hobbits notice (via @mandaloriandy)

The first night Bilbo camped with the company he very nearly said something about it, but, having no idea what dwarves are and thinking it might be rude, he kept the observation to himself and decided that dwarves must be some kind of fungus. It improved his estimation of them most incredibly, and was, in fact, one of the observations he was most keen to pass on when he got back, seeing as how—even if it didn’t quite make him respectable, per se—it at least provided a valuable new addition to hobbits’ mushroom-lore, which no one (not even a certain few silver-spoon possessing relatives) could fault him for.

[mandaloriandy]

#anyways it’s common knowledge in the shire that dwarves are actually just a kind of mushroom#but no one says anything#because they think (seeing as how the dwarves haven’t brought it up themselves) it would be rude (via @willowcrowned)

[mikkeneko]

My partner, reading this over my shoulder: “It never ceases to amaze me when Tolkein fans write meta that goes off in really bizarre directions”

Me: “These books are 70 years old, everything normal to say about them has been said; if you’re gonna say anything new about it, it’s gonna have to be weird”

[herssian]

"there is no way you're not using chatgpt for at least a few things here and there no matter your stance on it" what the FUCK are you talking about

[allykatsart]

[ashlgcostumes]

As someone who is both trans and has a child, absolutely hilarious to me that society presents one of these as absolutely only to be done if you are 110% certain and have proved to several people that you want it bad enough and are ready, and the other is like. You might as well everyone else does. Just do it nobody feels ready. You don’t want to? Yes you do

Especially since one of those is pretty reversible if you change your mind after a couple years and the other one, well, technically but that’s pretty frowned upon