《 val(entine) | c. 199X | they/she/he 》
☕️ ko-fi & art 🎨
One illustrator's drafting table for tid-bits, trinkets, anecdotes, and a staggering amount of personal opinions.
Most certainly not a vampire from the 1800's enamoured by the 21st century. The nocturnalism, verbose language, and mysterious maladies keeping me bedridden are all coincidental.
[Art: @glasurgeist] [feat. my art, WIPs, and commissions/prints when I remember to update]
[Drafting: @create-a-character] [feat. my drafts, original character musings, inspo, and references]
[Fandom: @yamato-sumeragi] [feat. hyperfixations and assorted fan content]
Nominal BYF:
Reader discretion advised if Gomez Addams-esque vibes aren't your deal. Existence is terribly exciting, life is full of wonder, and I am passionate about both my family and (very beautiful, very powerful) wifey.
If your blog is primarily steeped in demoralization, disinformation, and/or dogmatism, I will save us all time and block you.
You are encouraged to block me for literally any reason. I am not worth fixating on, but your time is worth curating.
My post timing is variable. 60% of posts/reblogs are queued, 30% are scheduled. Good luck with the other 10%.
I tag extensively. The terminology is mostly intuitive, but my grandfathered tags have an internal logic. An incomplete list can be seen here.
This blog is the domain of a chatterbox incapable of condensing a thought. You're free to screenshot/transcribe my ranting in the tags. My own posts and additions are rarely brief.
My criteria for following blogs is pretty low, as is my criteria for unfollowing. I do not perfectly align with everybody I follow.
As a treat, here is a collection of meme remasters and edits I've made. Please enjoy:
Hi, these bees are babies! They’re not clumsy at all, this is what is called orientation flights. After birth and before beginning their careers as foragers (as all Honey bees cycle through all the jobs in the Hive throughout their lifespan), Honey bees take short flights back and forth, to and from the Hive, to orient themselves with their wings and their home so they can learn its location and how to get back home after foraging! Everyone has to learn, these are just smol little baby turkeys. Bees use the angle of the sun for location so adults have a better and more direct sense of location than any human
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database.
Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July.
Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.”
Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check.
A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas.
She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head.
A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April.
The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount.
And the cameras keep falling.
Need to add that these cameras keep being found by road safety inspectors to not comply with crash safety requirements.
As in street lights and crash barriers and sign poles are all built to break off at the base when hit by a car, but these things are getting cemented into the ground. What this means is if you hit them at speed, they will not break away easilly and instead your car will wrap around them.
And they KEEP putting them within the zoning around roads where the break-away poles are required and they do not give a fuck.
So, removing them is important as they do not comply with basic road safety building requrements, but anyone removing these safety hazards should keep in mind minimum bumper heights so there's no amount of pole sticking up that will cause damage to a vehicle if it crashes on the verge where it was installed.
was outside earlier and a bird Came Up, squatted down, fluttered it’s wings at me and opened its mouth like a hatchling begging for food (it was a grown female) so I went and checked the seed cube in the feeder and the thing was completely covered in mold. this is one of the weirdest things that’s ever happened to me. how did she know im the one in charge of the birdseed. How Did She Know To Pantomime Hunger At Me. Hello.
i have spent my afternoon confusedly getting dressed, driving to the store, purchasing a new seed block, driving home, washing the cage, and getting the feeder set back up. i don’t take this much care for my Own nutrition. ive been bullied into a grocery store run by a tufted titmouse. i feel so loved
to be clear you SHOULD buy that cast iron pan and you SHOULD buy that knife set and you SHOULD buy that fancy rice cooker and you SHOULD buy that novelty mug. high quality kitchenware is always worth it you’re literally gonna be using that almost every day
There was a parenting-kids-with-trauma book I remember running into around 2010 (I was not and am still not a parent, but I am an older sibling) that had a lovely little slogan I like to quote all the time:
“It’s not about the Cheerios.”
This was in reference to a story about a kid flipping the HELL out into a full-blown panic about running out of their favorite cereal. Not a tantrum, not a whine-fest, but an all-hands-on-deck, code-red, world-is-ending blowup.
The kid had originally come from a very unstable situation and experienced food deprivation. The new adoptive parents were stumped, because look at all the other food! You’re safe! We can get the Cheerios tomorrow!
But it wasn’t really about the Cheerios, it was about that first flicker of unease triggering all the old trauma. From the outside, it looked ridiculous. To the trauma-trained reaction of the kid’s brain, it made perfect sense.
Human brains are weird, and we’re all out here trying to survive. Sometimes our brains do this in socially acceptable, convenient ways. But not often.
(The book was titled “Beyond Logic, Consequences or Control” I think, I’ll look it up and edit this in a bit.)
my inclusive education instructor had a version of this mantra as well: “there is always a reason.”
essentially, kids don’t flip out just for the hell of it, because generally speaking flipping out is just as bad of an experience for them as it is for you. there is always, in their head, a good reason for the way they’re feeling and it’s always your responsibility as the adult to trust in that fact and to work to find what that reason was.
i would have benefitted from this kind of reasoning as a kid, because i was the type to on occasion flip out for “no reason” or because i “just wanted attention.” this is because the flip out often happened if an adult ignored or rejected me. in actuality, during all of these events that i remember, i was upset because i felt misunderstood or stupid. i would then become more upset when i realized i was in trouble because i was in trouble and no one was trying to understand me.
it’s not like the cause of my meltdowns were very solvable, but being treated with trust would have gone a long way for me, because then i would have felt as if people were trying to understand me.
The new work requirements rule may take health care away from millions of disabled people. Check out our plain language explainer to learn all about this new rule and how you can take action to protect health care by writing a public comment! https://autisticadvocacy.org/2026/07/medicaid-work-requirements-learn-more-and-take-action
Worried about how work requirements might affect you? Our plain language resource can help you take action by writing a public comment: https://autisticadvocacy.org/2026/07/medicaid-work-requirements-learn-more-and-take-action
Grief is never far behind in the wake of disabilty eating away at your life. There is so much more I would like to do in a day. Places I long to see. Foods I am unhappy eating or foregoing. People I am not able to see, or hold, or talk to. There are countless dreams I have held – too precious to let go, but too much to achieve.
It is never for the reasons able bodied people think. I do not resent my body, because my body is me. But I'm left steeping in a world so hostile, and in a self without enough support. As moments of my life slip from my hands like liferafts, I am only left to think in this vast, enveloping sea: if only, if only, if only.
How can you come to terms with choices made for you? When do you get to attend the funerals of The Lives That Could Have Been? Where can your witnesses for suffering be found without risk of being buried for a broken body?
This is literally what people are talking about when they say AI will be used to mainstream widely held bigotry. LLMs are trained on frequency and probability -> straight relationships are more well represented in the dataset -> straight pronouns and terms become the "correct" normal.
This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).
Combine this with the mass of people inclined to believe (and being encouraged to believe) that if AI says and does something it must be correct
