todays bird
Andulka
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Stranger Things
NASA
Jules of Nature
tumblr dot com
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
No title available
cherry valley forever
RMH
Janaina Medeiros
@theartofmadeline
No title available
wallacepolsom
oozey mess
pixel skylines
Show & Tell
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
dirt enthusiast
seen from Finland
seen from Singapore
seen from Malaysia
seen from Mexico
seen from Spain
seen from Hungary
seen from Spain
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Finland
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Jordan
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Jordan
@vampiratesinaboat
Do you ever think about how so much of the deadly anti-science rhetoric that fills America today and is killing countless vulnerable people can be directly traced back to one fucking guy who decided to just straight-up lie about vaccines causing autism because it would make him a profit? Do you ever think about that? Because I think about it a lot.
hbomberguy does a spectacular job breaking this down in this video
Box + Cat.
Offensive wunking style
Flying is effortless, landing can be a little bit harder, Cornell Lab / DoC (northern royal albatross) (part 1)
why does it take SO much energy to keep your house only sort of clean
I haven't watched doctor who since series 7 but I still need that bts tell-all book about whatever the hell just happened and whatever the hell has been happening
May we all know decadence such as this
we’re so lucky that gilgamesh survived and is a banger. can you imagine if we found the oldest written human story ever recorded and it sucked balls.
thank god some sumerian editor wasn't all "gay shit doesn't sell"
Guys, queers. Specifically my fellow queers.
I work at a library. We do this thing where, every so often, we weed the collection. It hurts to see books go, but it's necessary to make sure there's room in the library for new materials.
I have seen so much support for the library in text, and I've seen folks pass around those beautiful "queer your library" flyers. Keep doing that. That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But you HAVE to turn your words into action. We MUST remember to actually go to our local organizations and libraries and actually, with our own fucking hands, interact with these materials we want to see more of.
My branch is medium-sized for a library, maybe a little small. We don't have as many materials as I'd like, but we have fundamentals. Tell me why, even with all the verbal support I've gotten from my local community for the library as a resource for our LGBT+ community, every single trans biography and a good chunk of our vaguely queer theory books were on the list. This isn't a scheme to take the books off the shelves, it isn't another bigoted American governmental push. The only thing we look at when we weed is how long it's been since the last time the item was checked out.
Three years.
No one in my community interacted in any meaningful way with the few books on trans life and history we physically had on the shelves for three fucking years.
I promise you the materials you want and need are there, but this isn't a horde. This isn't a static safety net. You have to use them. You MUST use them or, in the future, maybe in three years, they *won't* be there anymore.
This isn't a vague post, there's no one person I'm hinting at or calling out. I'm not even talking directly to anyone who's directly in my line of sight. I just want everyone to hear this. Big library, small library, whatever. Doesn't matter. Please, we cannot be losing our shelf visibility like this.
I work in a different library and can confirm, it's a decision based on popularity not censorship
we're big enough to have lots of shelf space but still have the problem on a different scale. We do have a back storage room rather than completely getting rid of some things, but having to ask for that might be a barrier for sensitive subject matter and prevent people from casually stumbling across something of interest
Yep. Different library worker here, we weeded adult non-fiction recently bc it's most rarely used and we needed to clear a bookshelf of space, and there were a decent number of queer books on the list. Thankfully not all of them, but some (we had a lot lol). Our criteria is also no borrows in 3yrs. I can't borrow the whole list by myself. I do try to get these books in, and the local authority are happy to buy them, but we need space for new books every so often and we can't keep everything forever! If you want them, you have to use them!
(incidentally, the whole list was 35 pages long, which... please borrow the books you want people)
I didn't have time to comment the first time I reblogged, but I can add now:
I'm also a librarian and queer books are almost always cut first when we have to weed for space or prioritize new releases over old items because no one reads them
I will say, when I worked at a large downtown location, we had a "browsing card" that we would check out items we found taken off the shelf and left on a table, as an example of a book that had clearly been read, just not checked out by anyone
it's possible queer books do actually get a bit of unfair treatment in this regard because people may be nervous or outright scared to check them out onto an account with their name on it. so they get browsed at a much higher rate, but if a library doesn't have a specific system in place (or need for it) to count browsed items, then it looks like they aren't being used and they get weeded
for other librarians, a browsing card is a great idea if you have enough staff for the extra work / enough items left out to justify it
for patrons, check out queer books even if you don't read them! you're not lying or committing any type of fraud. you're keeping books on the shelf long enough for pride season when people are interested in checking them out again and for people scared to use their own accounts or who don't have library cards
for anyone nervous about using their library card, libraries do not keep search histories of what you check out!! this means even if the government does come back with a warrant, *wet farting noise* too bad! it doesn't exist!
so please check out queer books!
I have to wonder how often they aren't checked out because those in an exploratory period may not feel safe enough for them to go home with them, too. Kids, for example, or folks who have ended up in a het marriage that... Doesn't feel like it's quite right (or may be physically abusive).
This is most definitely one of the causes of this. That's why it's so important for folks who *can* to *do*.
It feels like such a small thing, but all movements are made up of small things! We have this mindset that in order to get everything done, everyone must be doing their (or *the*) absolute best at all times. But not everyone can do the same things, to the same degree, with the same amount of productivity or success. Not everyone can; sometimes, they're the ones that need help. Sometimes people just need help.
This post is very much so intended for the people who can. I've seen a lot of replies from folks who say they don't have to (or don't think about) checking out or requesting queer books from the library specifically because they *can* buy them, can pirate them, or already have them in their house or on their computers or phones. But in instances like that, keeping these books in circulation is less for you and more for the people who can't. The folks who come to the library, who don't have access to internet--or even electricity--at home and would never--have never--been able to interact with this "ubiquitous queer community" we have here online who has made so many of these. materials so avaliable to the rest of us.
And... if I can be a little frank. Sometimes the hyperaccessibility of these materials online (through pirating, cheap e-book copies, etc) gives people a false sense of security. It implies that these things are an infinate resource, good for "When I get around to it".
And often, you won't. There's so much to read and so much to do. So much to download and so much to sit down and stare at for hours. That kind of mental scope puts books in people's hands (or phones), but never in their heads.
But the moment your favorite document archival site gets knocked offline for breaching copyright or your go-to mega corporate audiobook distributor decides it doesn't want "those" materials anymore, what's left? What did you download? What information did you internalize? Did you ever get around to it? If you did, great, but what good does that do for the person who didn't? Are you going to be the one to redistribute that information? Are you going to communicate it in the place of the author whose words are no longer publically accesible or, mostly avaliable, but only behind hefty paywalls and financial gatekeeping? How would someone else get a hold of it? How could they, if they wanted?
This is excellent info.
What are some good books to check out for those who can?
Gosh... there's so many options. I wouldn't know where to start without knowing who I'm talking to and what they're looking for. What I can recommend is for folks to check out creators like @makingqueerhistory who have spent just a ridiculously beautiful amount of time collecting queer history and book lists! You'll find something in seconds reading their page.
Personal pitch: I liked the books Tar Hollow Trans and Gay Poems for Red States. Both great.
I'm glad I was tagged in this because it means I can cosign (and also add a little nugget of info).
I live in a province that is currently trying to ban queer books from libraries, and as a library patron, this is terrifying. 95% of the books I read are from the library and a lot of them are way out of my budget to buy personally.
Making Queer History would not exist without the school library I skipped class in to write articles. It would not exist without my friends with library cards for their universities sharing them and getting me access to rare texts. I would not be able to read as much as I do without Libby and Hoopla. If I have ever given you a book recommendation, know that I likely got it from the library first.
I cannot overstate the importance of protecting libraries and checking out queer books. And I want to say thank you to everyone above for being as passionate as I am about queer books in libraries.
Love y'all <3
@official-library-posts
official library post
thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes
reasons for this:
basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that
I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not
An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.
please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them
legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes
Willing Suspension of Disbelief
Watsonian vs. Doylist
Trope Tropes, for all the ways tropes are used, deconstructed, subverted, and played with.
The Oldest Ones in the Book, which is basically my favorite thing on the entire Internet
Punk Punk, for -punk subgenres
Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness, Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism
The Weird Al Effect is a fun one
Chekhov’s Gun, Chekhov’s Boomerang, Chekhov’s Skill, and further variations
Law of Conservation of Detail
Law of Conservation of Normality
Anthropic Principle
Word of God, Death of the Author
Sliding Scale of Fourth Wall Hardness
Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness
Genre Savvy
Flashbacks and Chronology breaks down all the ways you can handle chronology in storytelling
Show, Don’t Tell is a very good breakdown of what is showing, what is telling, and how both can be used effectively.
Lampshade Hanging
Noodle Incident is just fun imo
Genre Title Grab Bag
Fridge Horror
Rule of Cool, and also Cool of Rule
The Smurfette Principle
The Hays Code - not a trope but a very good breakdown of how the Hays Code affected storytelling in film
this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful
Informed Attribute is one of the ones I reference most often as an editor.
Theory of Narrative Causality is one of my personal favorites, because it's kind of fun when a story acknowledges that things are happening in the story because that's what makes it a good story.
Also Applied Phlebotinum, because sometimes you don't need to know how something works, it just does, and that's all that matters for the purposes of the narrative.
So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).
Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.
So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.
You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.
And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.
It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.
Reblogging to drag this project over here, this is killing my notes on main so I'm giving it its own URL. Follow over here for updates on the star system generator and only the star system generator, and not on my Star Wars bullshit.
Will go through and tag interested parties when things calm down below 100 notes an hour.
You actually cannot skip to being good at a creative endeavour that you haven't put much practice into. You cannot trick your way out of the 'knows that your work is not what you want it to be but don't know how to improve it' stage by planning or reading or talking about it really really hard. At some point you just have to craft through it until your brain finds it's own unique way back to the 'everything I make slaps' stage and be prepared to start the cycle all over again. You just have to make that project you're excited about slightly less good than you want it to be. (Says this standing in a pool of blood and covered in blood and also coughing up a little blood)
everyone stop reblogging this I hate to be reminded of my own good advice
oops this was still in my drafts from a few days ago:
had a cuckoo bananas dream last night, vivid as usual lmao. i was a seven year old girl raised in a cult which worshipped me as the eighth reincarnation of their founding leader. we lived on a huge ranch compound in the middle of nowhere. it was a zombie-apocalypse dream which is funny 2 me because i don't really like zombie content and don't consume it often.
i didn't see any zombies in the dream, the dream just started with me knowing there had been zombies. but following most zombie media, i lived in a world where there was no zombie media so we were all confused and shocked by zombies. it picked up a day or two after everyone in my cult had either died or fled.
i was alone on the compound, having hidden for two days in a closet with a false back wall, where i was taught to hide if anyone ever came to "attack" our cult. none of this was surprising to me, because i'd been raised believing the world had already ended and that we were the last surviving population of humans on earth. i'd been expecting some sort of horrible attack all my life. i also believed i was the only girl on earth, and that girls were only born as the reincarnations of our leader. everyone else i knew were all men and boys. no idea where the boy children came from? the nebulous nature of dream logic.
the dream pretty much began with me hiding in my spot, when i became aware of some people searching the building i was in, and then the room. they were taking all of our food and medical supplies (understandable) and talking about staying for a while because the grounds seemed pretty defensible now that the zombies were all gone.
i stayed hidden for a whole night and another day before i got extremely hungry and tried to sneak out of my spot while everyone was sleeping in the early morning, but i didn't consider they'd have someone awake on-watch for zombies.
he saw me and i ran to hide again so he woke up a few other people to find me. they ended up finding me in my hiding place and i chose fight over flight and threw myself at them so viciously that one of them almost shot me because he thought i was a zombie. but i was screaming words so they stopped him and in the end i was being so outrageously nasty (clawing at their eyes with success) that they ended up somehow pinning me down and rolling me up in a giant bedsheet so i was literally swaddled into submission.
they argued a while about what to about me and one of the guys was like "maybe she'll respond better to a woman" (zombie movie guy character logic idk) and they agreed to take me back with them to their like, longer-term camp some miles away (i guess there were on some sort of exploratory mission for medical supplies?)
so they kept me in my swaddle and started carrying me with them down the road and all the while i was like you can't do this to me. i'm god! you're not allowed to touch me!
the dream skipped ahead and we made it to some big walled-in town that seemed like a genuinely thriving little community. and they all split up and left me with one guy who took me home with him and he put me down on the floor where i literally was thrashing around in the sheet like a horrible grub and a woman came in (not sure of their relation to each other) and she was like "oh my god, what is that?" and he was like, clearly offended that she didn't immediately feel some sort of Maternal Instinct for me and he said, "that's a little girl! A child!" and she said, "okay, well I don't want it?" and he said, "huh, well neither do I!" and I started shouting at them to let me go or they'd be stricken down with horrible curses because I was God and she said, "Oh, that's great. She's all fucked up." And he was like, clearly irritated and dismissive, "That's okay, that's just something she says" and then they both looked at me and I was looking at them like I thought I could really kill them with my eyes. And then I woke up.
my watery friend... are you too brushed with the pattern of the dappled light...?
[ID: a photograph of a seal with a blobby splotchy silver pattern on its back that resembles light refracting in water, next to a photo of light's flowing white stripes at the bottom of a pool. Second set of images is a fawn ccurled up in the grass, next to a forested trail aglow with dappled light spots. end id.]
dappled with light
Kimagure Buta
I couldn’t resist starting another Luminous once I saw this line of fabric. It’s called Color Collage by Shelley Davies from Northcott and it’s been in the back of my mind for ages.
I’m using six colours in the piecing, which should make it 92”x109” (unless I mess with the pattern even more and take one of the rows out completely) which will technically be a king size LOL The seventh colour pink is gonna be used on the binding so I get to use alllll the colours we had in stock in the shop 🎉
Someone please stop me, I can’t stop making these fucking things lmao 😭😭😭😂😂😂 I had a plan to do something else but I couldn’t help it!
Okay, blocks done and middle rows complete!
I did take one row out of the centre so there are only two red centre blocks instead of three. 109” is too big for my queen bed, but I can work with 101” LOL
Technically this will still fit a king at 92”x101”, but I am a blanket hog and that feels like a really skinny king to me.
ALSO??
Because I altered the amount of rows (downsizing) but did not alter the amount of blocks I made, I ended up with just enough left over to make two matching pillow cases! They are even on point like the quilt.
This is gonna look spectacular on a bed.
It’s so beautiful…. 😭😭😭💖💖💖
And it’s so fucking big LOL
Not as big as the greyscale king for my brother, but still. It feels big.
As you can see a little from the roll on the back of the long arm, I found a fun rainbow universe print to put on it with all the colours on the front.
I’m quilting the pillowcases too, though in a tighter pattern so they can handle more washing.
I can’t wait to put this on a bed.
I love it so much. My favourite Luminous, I swear.
The pillow cases look so good too. As I mentioned, I quilted them much tighter than the quilt so they can be thrown in the wash a lot more. Same pattern, just smaller design.
It’s so busy, I could stare at it for hours finding things in the prints.
Also? I love the pink binding. I really did want to use every colour, so this was a nice compromise to having to resize everything LOL
The backing is also so busy LOL You can hide a lot of pet fur on both sides of this thing.
The pillowcases turned out great. I used the leftover from the backing to back the pillow cases so that everything matches. And they’re envelope style so the pillows won’t slip out. Hate it when the pillowcase slips off my pillow.
I had to sew three 45” wide strips of fabric together for the backing to fit on the long arm. Since the quilt was only 101” at its widest, I had a whole 30” strip that was usable and perfect for this.
