This is blog is for sharing my stories and other things I like with a different audience than I get on Twitter.
Thank you for dropping by and hope you are having a great day.
Avatar by Syggie Various projects of mine:
Ask TWP Pony - A for funzies ask blog for my OC pony. Not that artistic, but it is all funzies.
TWP on FiM Fiction - A repository of my works as posted on FiM Fiction
TWP Twitter - I love to tweet, plus there are insights to my current stories on there.
TWP on deviantArt - A collection of most of my stories (with horrible formatting thanks to dA) and a lot of my colorized sketches.
I need help to survive day-to-day!
Anything you can spare helps otherwise I will continue to happily do this for free, if a little hungry.
Okay. So I haven’t posted stuff here in forever. (Seeing the current layout, I’m not sad about that...)
Anyway!
Since mid January, I’ve been working on learning how to draw Lop from Star Wars Visions. She is my favorite (non-canon) character in Star Wars, and she deserves a ton more love and fan art. Here are first seven weeks of that effort. Since then, I’ve switched to larger sketches posted daily on my Twitter and started learning how to digitally ink and color my sketches. I have more in depth explanations about what I was attempting for each sketch on my Discord, but that is friends only. If there is enough interest here, I’ll share more here as well.
I feel like nobody talks about this but remember Jay’s “job interview” in the original Men in Black movie? Sure, they play it for comedy, he’s a smartass cop surrounded by all these elite military graduates. But he was also literally the only one in the room smart enough to bring the table over so he had something to write on. And he offers it to the other guys too!
And in the shooting test, on the surface it just seems like a goofy joke when he shoots the little girl cutout in the head, but look at the way he responded to the situation.
The test starts immediately without any warning, we can see that everyone is caught off guard. The other candidates immediately open fire on what they perceive to be threats, but Jay takes a second to assess the situation. He sees he isn’t in any immediate danger, and in a handful of seconds he’s able to scope out several minor details about the targets and hit one with a near-perfect headshot. Jay showed he was an innovative, quick thinker with situational awareness, attention to detail and high-level marksmanship skills, and they never say it outright but I think that’s probably why Zed picked him. (Zed never actually says anything negative about Jay’s performance, just that he has a problem with authority.)
This is highly underrated writing but, then again, this is also the movie where Tommy Lee Jones says “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew Earth was the centre of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat and 15 minutes ago, you knew humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”
Plus, the stuff he says about the alien “targets?” You can tell that he isn’t the sort to attack anyone without a DAMN good reason. Which is how we know that the movie is fiction, because an actual cop shoots first and asks questions later.
When Jay is introduced he is running down a fleeing suspect. He chases the guy so long and so far that the MIB are like “Whoa, that’s double-tough”, and I think he threatens to shoot him a couple times, but he never actually shoots him.
In other words, Jay did NOT shoot the fleeing suspect in the back, which 99.99 percent of his coworkers would have done.
not to mention he had the observation skills to identify an alien gun, after seeing it once, for about 2 seconds in the dark, before he even knew aliens were real. It’s easy to miss because Jay spends most of the movie seeming out of his depth with all this alien stuff being so new to him, but he’s actually excellent at his job
I love these! From a series by photographer Sophia Vogel called With and Without. Which she summarises (translated from German):
The project and each individual image is intended to encourage society to think about itself, its own body, about acceptance. For diversity and against beauty ideals (advertising) and all the environs for the exterior. I advocate in this work for self-love and acceptance of one’s own body, as well as the acceptance of others with their peculiarities.
It’s also an excellent illustration of the absurdity of our default clothed habits. Even if you’re not able to overcome the wider cultural taboo of nudity, why wear clothes at home when it’s not cold? What purpose do clothes serve when you’re just sat at a computer or watering your plants? You don’t need protection from clothing most of the time. Indeed sometimes, like doing yoga, they’re just a hindrance!
Being naked should be normal; we all have bodies, and they are far both far more diverse and far more alike than the media representation of bodies would have so many believe. I think we’d all be happier healthier people if we weren’t so scared of our own physical forms.
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.
I am so pleased at how many notes are some version of “I don’t fear the science, I fear the corporations who control it” because that is EXACTLY the attitude you should have. GMOs can save us. Monsanto will kill us.
what people fear about GMO- ‘theyre gonna make frankencarrots that crave human flesh and cause diarrhea ’
what GMO actually is- ‘we made rice crop that is both drought resistant and flood resistant which will prevent about 20% of major famine disasters, also it now makes vitamin A because vitamin A deficiency in poverty stricken areas is a major killer of kids as most vitamin A rich foods dont grow there’
what people SHOULD be upset about- ‘i made all crops sterile so all farmers have to buy the seed from me in perpetuity and i will sue anyone who tries to go back to crops that produce their own seed’
If you live and vote in California, I hope by now you've heard that there is an election happening on September 14th. You may have even gotten your ballot in the mail already.
An election? In September? Yes. A stupid one.
You see, some Republicans got Big Mad at Governor Gavin Newsom when he made the decision to lockdown the state last year at the beginning of the pandemic. They decided to start a petition to remove (recall) him from office. California's state constitution allows voters to remove the governor via recall election if they get enough signatures.
How many signatures, you ask? 12% of the total votes cast in the previous election for the office of the person being recalled, or in this case, 1.5 million.
Yeah. That's all. Out of a state of nearly 40 million people. A state that is the 5th largest economy in the world.
Just 1.5 million people need to sign an official recall petition for a statewide vote to remove the governor from office.
(If you didn't know, a recall election is how California got Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor in 2003.)
If a simple majority (50% + 1 vote) of voters choose YES on their ballots, Gavin Newsom will be removed from office and whomever of the 46 candidates on the ballot gets more votes than anyone else (not even a majority vote, just more than the other candidates) will become California's new governor.
The current (as of today, August 20th) frontrunners are a very right-wing talk radio host named Larry Elder, and a real estate broker/YouTube personality named Kevin Paffrath. Neither have what you would call "political experience."
(Caitlin Jenner is also running. Just in case you were wondering.)
How do you get on a recall ballot in California? To replace the governor, the highest office in the state? Well, you need to complete the arduous task of forking over about $4000 and getting 7500 signatures of real Californians saying they back you as a candidate.
Yeah. That's all.
Oh, and just having this election is costing CA taxpayers over $250 million dollars.
So what's at stake if Newsom gets recalled?
Majority control of the US Senate.
You see, Senator Dianne Feinstein is 88 years old this year. She's been Senator since 1992. If she falls too ill to continue her duties, if she resigns, if she dies while in office, California does not hold a Senatorial election.
The governor appoints a replacement.
This is how we got our current junior Senator, Alex Padilla, after Kamala Harris was inaugurated as Vice President.
Let me say that again.
The governor appoints a replacement Senator if Dianne Feinstein cannot complete her term.
If enough people vote to recall Gavin Newsom, and a Republican, or Libertarian, or, let's be honest, any inexperienced wet sack that can be bought off by the highest bidder, takes his place, they will very possibly appoint a Republican Senator to replace Dianne Feinstein and put that fuckface Mitch McConnell back in control of the US Senate.
So please, please, if you're a Californian, make sure you're registered to vote, get your ballot, and vote NO on this stupid waste of money recall election.
The 12 questions that help explain the historical, political and logistical forces behind the effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom of Californ
And more: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-08-18/vote-recall-election
"78 percent of registered Republicans said they were “very interested” in voting in the recall, while only 47 percent of registered Democrats said the same. And while Newsom could theoretically take comfort in that 57 percent approval rating in the CBS News poll, that figure won’t help him unless people vote who don’t seem particularly inclined to." https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/california-recall-election-newsom-ballot-mess.amp
What a fucking waste of taxpayer money. Vote no on recall and when you do, say a special fuck you to the unqualified, revanchist, talk radio dilettante who would be king. (at California)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CSsMUlnFGrJ/?utm_medium=tumblr
imagine seeing a post that says “kids don’t deserve to get bullied” and thinking this is a remotely acceptable response to it
this is exactly the sort of callous, heartless mentality that makes me SICK and if i catch anyone else i follow saying this shit or sharing it uncritically i WILL hunt you down and peel you like a grape
I was relentlessly bullied for being weird (which is to mean, neurodivergent) as a child and guess what? I didn’t “learn how to not be an obnoxious weirdo”, I only started hating myself and developed an anxiety disorder which made me become straight up afraid of people, aka even more weird. So if you claim bullying is a way to teach weird kids not to be weird, you’re not just a terrible person; you’re also stupid because it doesn’t work.
That was the mentality up until the 1970s and SOMEHOW, MYSTERIOUSLY, it completely failed to work, and now we have a flotilla of scientific evidence that bullying fucks people up good while making children treat each other like fucking human beings is incredibly good for all of them so like…. nah.
Kid me, a ‘weirdo’ bc neurodivergent and not cis: *Bullied*
Adult me, a ‘weirdo’ bc amazingly still neurodivergent and not cis: *Still a weirdo but like also deeply traumatized with additional weird due to debilitating social anxiety and rejection sensitive dysphoria now*
My uncle was one of the top surgeons in the country. He was upper middle class definitely. When he got cancer, his insurance didn’t cover all the treatments he would need and after 5 years he drained his savings on cancer treatments (while still working most of that time) and eventually died because he couldn’t afford the expensive treatments that might have saved him.
If you are upper middle class and you get sick, it will likely bankrupt your family. It’s fucked.
Honest to god - even if you make 6 figures a year? you're closer to poverty than true wealth. Check your shit and remember who your real allies and enemies are guys.
A 6 figure income is a lot right?
That’s say: 223,000 dollars a year
Which is 112 dollars an hour.
Most people would consider that upper middle class. That’s enough money to have a nice house, go on fun vacations. That’s slight more than the average doctor makes.
223,000 dollars is what Jeff Bezo makes in a minute
