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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
macklin celebrini has autism
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noise dept.
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RMH
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
YOU ARE THE REASON
Fai_Ryy
Color Me Curious
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@theartofmadeline
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Monterey Bay Aquarium
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@yukinojou
For the express purposes of pinning to Twitter, because Elon is an idiot and goodness knows when Twitter will implode entirely:
@bwinter.bsky.social
Here, of course
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And in the before times, @bwinter@twitter
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Ca’ d'Oro façade overlooking the Grand Canal, Venice - Italy
Strikingly lifelike mid-13th century sculptures by the anonymous sculptor known as the Naumburg Master
"Take" by Serhii Zhadan, translated from Ukrainian by Ellen Poplavska.
Bamboo and dragonfly, calligraphy ‘take a rest’ (choito hito yasumi), by Mitsuru Nagata.
your home is absolutely beautiful!!! do you have advice for people who’d want to decorate like you or any methods you use when decorating?
@starsabove-aspect
Take it slow, take it sincerely, and don't take it seriously.
If you like to watch people do home decor online, you will often see people doing professional level whirlwind makeovers, where the whole space is transformed in a matter of days. That is not realistic for what decorating your own home is like, unless you have hella money to throw at the project. In which case, congratulations.
But more practically, I am usually only doing things one step at a time. I have a vague vibes-based concept for each room--I can reblog an older post about that, if you like--and then it's just a question of stumbling across the right items for the space. Usually I start with a paint color, and even then, there's often a process of trial and error. I painted the whole sunroom three times before I mixed a shade of verdigris I liked. I did my whole bedroom in one shade of black before I realized I wanted a different sheen of paint and a more complex color. And then it's a waiting game. Waiting to come across the right furniture. Waiting to find art that I like for the walls. Waiting to feel like I've got my head around what I want for the room.
It's really just figuring out what you think is interesting, and cool, and beautiful, and finding places in your home that fit.
I do think the Hank Green AI thing makes it abundantly clear that if you have ADHD or any other mental illness and/or you are prone to addiction you need to avoid AI at all costs. This shit will rope you in, and if you have a mental illness that say, starves your brain of dopamine, you're gonna be extra susceptible to that. I won't use AI for a lot of reasons but one of the big ones is knowing how it would fuck with my ADHD and bipolar. Like yes, it's bad for the environment and giving money to rich scumbags and runs on plagarism, but even more than all that, it's straight up not safe at all and you really shouldn't use it if for no other reason than to protect yourself from whatever the fuck it might do to you.
This is Tie, she is going to eat all of the notes
reblog to feed her notes
How is she doing this
this isn't really the same thing as intentionally/unintentionally a-spec characters but it is interesting thinking about how intentionality does dramatically change how characters read regarding a-spec identities and themes.
So: repurposed vaguely Kinseyesque scale describing your aromantic and/or asexual protagonist's awareness of and relationship to their own aromanticism/asexuality:
Unaware That This Is A Thing People Can Be. Type specimen: Carl from Dungeon Crawler Carl. Has never once considered that "not wanting romance or sex" is a thing people could feel, let alone identify as. He is normal, which means straight. It's just a coincidence that his relationship with his girlfriend was a disaster and now he's just way too busy in this new nightmare dystopia world for any of that! Anyway!
Aware They Have These Feelings, Assumes Everyone Else Also Does. Type specimen: Doug Eiffel from Wolf 359. Firmly believes that his aro-allo experiences are universal and everybody else is just better at acting like a functional human being than he is. Being a huge movie nerd also leads him to believe that "romance" as we understand it is massively exaggerated for drama in movies and people in real life don't actually do and feel that stuff any more than they mind-meld or can use the Force. He's just a fuckup at everything; why wouldn't relationships be included in that? For most of the show if you told him about aromanticism he would NOT be comforted about it, he'd probably take it as a diagnosis that his fuckup-ness regarding relationships was innate and incurable. (This doesn't have to be negative; this is also where Andy Wheyface from Arden falls and he is having a GRAND old time.)
Aware They Have These Feelings, Realizes That It Sets Them Apart From Others, Doesn't Conceptualize It As Part Of An Identity. Type specimen: Ryland Grace from Project Hail Mary. His reaction to other people having sex is mostly "why would you do that." His single attempt at a serious romantic relationship didn't work out and he has a nagging sense that there is something in him that can't maintain serious relationships; attributes it to cowardice and fear of commitment. Ironically he does know what asexuality is. He's a middle school teacher in 2020s California, he has absolutely gotten LGBTQ+ Sensitivity Education at least in "pamphlet listing queer identities" form, he for sure has students with pride flag pins on their backpacks and pride stickers on their notebooks, and he is also not immune from the Culture War Bullshit around gender in schools. Knowing that asexuality exists did not even slightly lead him to apply this to himself.
Aware They Have These Feelings, Considers Them Significant, Attributes Them To Some Existential Feature Of Their Existence Rather Than A Personal Identity. Type specimen: Murderbot from The Murderbot Diaries. Murderbot is very confident it does not want anything to do with romance or sex, and it attributes this to Being A SecUnit, and romance and sex are Human Things SecUnits Don't Do. Has not yet realized that this is an itself thing and not a SecUnit thing. Probably willfully at this point.
Considers These Feelings A Significant Aspect Of Their Selfhood, But Doesn't Name It. Type specimen: Sister Carpenter from The Silt Verses. Clearly confident in who she is and what she wants in her personal relationships, recognizes that as something that makes her different from others and out of step with what others expect from her, and is basically like, that's their problem. She knows who she is. Sometimes other people try to make it her problem but she has so many other problems that societal amatonormativity keeps getting pushed lower and lower on her list of Problems.
Recognizes Themself As Aromantic/Asexual As A Personal Identity. Type specimen: Nova NoStar from InCo. Clearly considers this part of her identity, but is allergic to talking about her feelings even at her therapy android's insistence and besides that's not anybody else's business is it?
Publicly Identifies As Asexual And Describes It With Period-Correct Sexual Orientation Language. Type specimen: Sally Grissom from ars PARADOXICA. The only character I've ever heard come out as asexual and lay out the definition in terms of sexual orientation and attraction to another character on-air that made me go "yeah she would do this, this is in character for Sally." Strongly feel like she would be an active commenter on the 2010s ace blogosphere. Would get in an argument about the correct definition of asexuality on AVEN.
X. Their Culture Conceptualizes Intimate Relationships In A Fundamentally Different Framework Than We Use. Type specimen: Breq from the Imperial Radch Trilogy. Whatever model of gender and sexuality the Radch is on it is NOT ours. Breq is still not interested though.
#interesting these are all scifi it makes me think there's something in the water there that allows for broader aspec theme building #probably because social norms are often imagined differently in scifi (tags via @variousqueerthings)
This is a really interesting aspect that I was definitely thinking about when I put this list together, because it began as an expansion of this post and I was freely mixing characters that are canonically and intentionally written as aro and ace, and characters who were not at all intended to come off that way but really do to me and/or a lot of people. But it's true, and I think that speaks to something about how different genre narratives prioritize things that lead to these readings!
A lot more thoughts about this under the cut:
1300-1400 clothing of Lower Empire
The Byzantine Empire, that is.
Oh FUCK
My eyes have just fallen out of my head because of this gorgeous fabric.
Because one can never get enough visuals of medieval clothing …
👏👏👏
So--when I was in my mid-twenties and the Disaster Ex tried to make me kill myself, the local mental hospital didn't have any beds open in the usual ward for attempted suicides.
What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.
They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.
I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.
I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.
And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.
Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.
They were all so fucking nice.
And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.
Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.
They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.
That was in 2009. Things are worse now. I think about them still. I hope that they're all right.
And in case some people aren't aware: anorexia is deadly. There is a point at which your body looses the ability to digest food and you are no longer capable of improving.
Two decades ago I had a very faint signal in one corner of the garden here at the lakeside.
Today I finally have fiber that's freaking faster than the one at home.
I may finally have to start traveling for the summer with my laptop.
Evening dress, Laracy (New York), c.1888
Off-white silk faille trimmed with pink and blue crepe de chine.
via valentine museum
watching my husband get diagnosed with and treated for sleep apnea over the last year was not the thing that radicalized me re: weight and healthcare but my goodness it has solidified my stances.
sleep apnea is more common in people who are fat.
society decided for some reason that this meant that being fat causes sleep apnea. its often difficult to get referrals for sleep apnea treatment if you are fat, because some PCPs will tell you try losing weight first.
turns out!! having untreated sleep apnea causes weight gain in a not-insignificant number of people. it also makes it fucking impossible for many people to lose weight.
my husband worked out the same amount before he got a cpap as he does now. there have been no major diet changes either. yet he has been losing weight -- and gaining muscle tone -- consistently since he started using a cpap in january.
also, his blood pressure -- which was high, which docs blamed on his weight/diet -- went down significantly within one month of starting cpap treatment, before his weight changed significantly.
ANYWAYS. this is getting long. two final thoughts.
- I Want To Strangle Medical Fatphobia With My Bare Fucking Hands
- if you are exhausted constantly for "no reason", and especially if you snore, you should probably ask your doctor about getting tested for sleep apnea. it is extremely common -- estimates are around 1 in 10 people -- and is also wildly under-diagnosed. like, some estimates suggest that 80% of people with moderate-severe sleep apnea are undiagnosed.
Put fandom for the first fic you posted online and the year your posted it in the tags.
reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this
I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset
What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know
Mordor.
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
So what is a rain shadow?
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.
my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.
so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.
the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.
also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:
it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.
#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass
On a Watsonian level, sure.
On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.
I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."
I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.
LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)
Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.
#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains
I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:
Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?
I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.
There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.
Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.
(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)
Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.
This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.
As for the greater picture...well, I thought there’d be nothing to it. Slap down a few additional continents. Fretwork some fjords. Sprinkle on some cities, steppes and forests. Jot down the traditional features that Terry referred to as ‘the good old wiggly river between the pointy mountains,’ paste on the names, and I’d be home and looking for a clean towel. In fact, it took a lot more time than that. I showed draft number one to Terry, who looked at it for some time and said, ‘Do you know what a rain shadow is?’ This was new to me, who took raffia instead of geography. I was given a short lecture on mountain ranges and prevailing rain-bearing winds, which gently led up to the fact that I’d put the Great Nef the driest place in the world, in what would have been a very large swamp. I spent some time reading up on the subject until I could bore people on the subject of plate tectonics and even knew what a drumlin was. Then I tried to make it all work.
--Stephen Briggs on making the discworld map
