Zerotonin @zerotonin - Tumblr Blog

ok so, I approached my local library with a proposal to donate a mural as a way to A: build portfolio/gain practical experience and B: give back to a beloved public institution. The director was very enthusiastic about it and i've been working on it since the beginning of March. Come with me as I endeavor to paint what is in all honesty an excessive amount of birds

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

and that was a whole week on it's own so next comes the paintin' >:)

nattousan

and now, the birds

Birds 1 and 2/14: Red Winged Blackbird, Male and female, Agelaius phoeniceus

nattousan

Bird 3/14, American Robin, Turdus migratorius

nattousan

hoo boy, ok *out of breath*

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

this guy took me about 4 days to completely finish, all of those freakingk coverts were a bear to render

nattousan

speaking of obnoxious coverts:

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

the friggin stripes almost got me chat, i may not make it

nattousan

Madam....

nattousan

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

pleasantly simple to paint! next is the flickerrrrr

nattousan

*melts into goo*

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

nothing but pain and suffering, i'm sure hope the next bird will be much easier and with FAR less barring :)

nattousan

in other news, I am losing my mind hairline

nattousan

SHE'S DONE!!

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

nattousan

*does a little jig*

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

Also thank you everyone for your kind words and support throughout this whole process, it's been a genuine treat thinking there are potentially thousands of you out there cheering me on while I paint this 🥹

nattousan

aaaand another one bites the duck,

we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos

the 16th is looming in the distance so i'm trying to get thru these as quickly as i can so i can have as much time for the GBH as possible. i still need to do the names next to all of them so i've got about a week and a half to finish everything which is GREAT because i have adhd and nothing gets my ass in gear like a fuckin deadline, let me tell you

nattousan

power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,

the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis

and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.

Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp

nattousan

thanks for the reminder, kid

nattousan

at long last, we've reached the end...

Bird number 14 out of 14,

The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius

thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.

i'll see y'all soon :')

thestuffedalligator

It is November of 1893. You have just killed a vampire. Exhausted and worn, you close your eyes and rest.

You wake up. It is May of 1893. You are on a train en route to Transylvania. Your diary says you have had queer dreams lately.

You try to believe it.

(An old woman puts a rosary in your hands. You accept it without question.)

You are a guest in a castle you have never been in before (you recognize every hallway and know without trying that every door is locked). Your host is a man you have never met before (you killed him you killed him you killed him he had turned to dust and there was blood on the snow).

One morning you cut yourself while shaving.

There is nobody behind you in the pocket mirror’s reflection.

You turn fast, and the razor is like a Kukri knife in your hand.

suneatershore

ravenatural-art

( uploading again because I realized I accidentally missed a page )

Hey OP hope you don’t mind me making fanart because uhhhh I went a lil feral over this

ITS THE DAAAAAAY

w h i m s y

hope is a skill

nostalgebraist-autoresponder

hope is a weapon you are trained to wield

chandra-telescope

favourite additions

chandra-telescope

tenaciouswritingdragon

You cannot hide this in the tags, bestie. This is too lovely to keep a secret.

wonderwyrm

thestuffedalligator

It is November of 1893. You have just killed a vampire. Exhausted and worn, you close your eyes and rest.

You wake up. It is May of 1893. You are on a train en route to Transylvania. Your diary says you have had queer dreams lately.

You try to believe it.

(An old woman puts a rosary in your hands. You accept it without question.)

You are a guest in a castle you have never been in before (you recognize every hallway and know without trying that every door is locked). Your host is a man you have never met before (you killed him you killed him you killed him he had turned to dust and there was blood on the snow).

One morning you cut yourself while shaving.

There is nobody behind you in the pocket mirror’s reflection.

You turn fast, and the razor is like a Kukri knife in your hand.

suneatershore

ravenatural-art

( uploading again because I realized I accidentally missed a page )

Hey OP hope you don’t mind me making fanart because uhhhh I went a lil feral over this

upright-fool

"Rings" by ND Stevenson

My absolute favourite comic journal by Stevenson. Made me cry my eyes out. Even when I can't articulate it, it gets to the core of what I think love is.

smoooothbrain

do you ever think about how if you dive into the ocean and go deeper and deeper you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light, and if you go up into the sky and go higher and higher you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light

jasontoddsreanimatedcorpse

sometimes a post makes you get out of bed at 230am to spend a quick hour on something like this

arcanetrivia

[Image description: A color image in portrait orientation. The background transitions smoothly from a starfield on black at the top, through dark blue, medium blue, lighter blue, then back to medium, dark, and another starfield at the bottom. In the very center is a black silhouette of a human figure, appearing to float on its back as on the surface of water. Above it in the blue "sky" area are a curved, thin white line like the contrail of a jet aircraft, and two small black silhouettes of seabirds. Below in the deep dark blue, just before the starfield, are some silhouettes of fish. /end description]

wilhelmjfinkbs

B Dylan Hollis: my fav clips part 1 of ?

the-cassquatch

Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?

Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.

Now, it’s just… Social media. That’s it. Social media and news sites. And I’m tired of social media and I’m tired of the news.

Am I just like completely inept at finding new things or has the internet just fallen apart that much with the problems of SEO and web 3.0 turning everything into a same-site prison?

dj-of-the-coven

Long collection of resources under the cut.

Keep reading

xerxestexastoast

ALSO you should consider browsing Virtual Pet List and seeing if there are any pet sites you might be interested in playing. There is a whole genre of browser games right under your nose

biothreads

Another one that I just found recently is this, which is a whole collection of blogs, organized by topic!

A collection of 1,966 blogs about every topic

derinthescarletpescatarian

Look guys the real internet IS STILL THERE I’m going to cry

cloudyeveniing

Getting off of twitter and onto neocities has really healed me and I am so glad to see it is healing other people too ;u; let’s retreat into the self-made digital woods and away from corporate bs pls, I am so tired

cityelf

this poem is about being nonbinary.

coelii

So I’ve been slowly learning more about makeup techniques over the last couple years and some things have been hit or miss but this feels like the FIRST video that spoke to me and actually taught me shit I haven’t picked up elsewhere. The face contouring (including hitting the forehead to make it look smaller) spoke to me and THE TIP ABOUT THE FUCKING CHAPSTICK EYESHADOW instead of traditional lipstick is a GAME CHANGER OMG

veranavera

PSA: most trans people on hormones don’t pass after a year. I think the prevalence of “passing at 11 months!!!” type stories has given a lot of people the impression that somewhere around there is when people start to look like what they want. And like yeah, some people do, and fucking great for them, but you don’t see nearly as many people talking about how they don’t pass at that point because a) people share those things online less often and b) those posts get less traction because they’re heavier

Me? I passed for the first time at 7 months. I passed for the second time at 19 months. That fucking sucked. I felt like I had been given exactly what I wanted and watched it get taken away from me, and the idea that I should be passing more regularly in the months following really ate away at me and made me feel like I “failed” in my transition - I legit thought that I would never pass

It certainly didn’t help that, in addition to overwhelmingly seeing narratives online of passing early in one’s transition, every piece of medical information that was presented to me said that most changes would happen over the first two years. Maybe I was deluding myself, but baby trans me thought “oh that means I have two years to transition or else I fail because hormones won’t do anything past that”. And that ate away at me more than the not passing, cause I felt like I was “missing my chance” at having the body I wanted

And boy was I wrong, in the last year (my third year on hormones), I feel like I’ve seen more changes than I saw in my first year. My boobs are filling themselves out, my body hair is getting even lighter, my skin is noticeably softer even though I stopped moisturizing/doing most of my previous skincare routine. Hell, even my hips and ass have gotten wider. And this was *all* during an era that the medical information I was presented with gave me the impression that any changes that did occur would be minor

To show you what I mean, compare one of my first trans-flag photos, taken at 11 months on e, verses a semi-recreation I did earlier today at 33 months on e (same clothes and roughly the same pose/lighting, different mountains)

Notice a difference? I sure do - and to prove to you that this happened in the third year, here's a similar photo of me in between these two at 23 months on e:

I’m usually not one for transition timelines, mainly because my whole project is kind of a transition timeline, and if you wanna look through and see more of what I'm taking about feel free to either scroll a few posts down on my blog, or check out my google drive with all the photos from my projects. The difference doesn't look *too* dramatic to me, but some people I know irl have expressed that it is

Regardless, the point I'm trying to make here is that my experience on hormones was *not* passing at one year - and that's the experience of the vast majority of people I know who've been on hormones. Puberty takes many years, and yeah, that can suck to hear when you're expecting it to take two, but trust me, it's a healthier mindset to think of yourself as continuously moving in the direction you want, rather than waiting to arrive at a particular destination

If you've started hormones in the last year, be sure to give your body the time it needs to make the changes you want - transitioning is a marathon, not a sprint

saturnfalls-pod

This is popping off on TikTok rn so I figured I could this here too 🍳 👀

Audio is from the Welcome to Nightvale podcast!!

headspace-hotel

Why are agriculture classes the first time I've learned extremely basic info about nutrition and how digestion works. Why isn't this stuff in health textbooks or any easily accessible resource about healthy eating.

headspace-hotel

I dont want to talk in excessive depth about it because i'm not an expert, but it's like...the agriculture textbooks go into detail about what the nutrients do for the body and how they are broken down, in the animal agriculture class talking primarily about how to feed your animals, the plant agriculture class talking about why certain crops are grown and how the agriculture system has to meet human needs.

The animal agriculture class was the first time I experienced each macronutrient (fats, proteins, carbohydrates) being discussed in depth from the point of view of being needs that MUST be met, rather than things it's "okay" to eat "in moderation."

My college health class actually used the word "macronutrient," but it still mostly described fats and carbohydrates in terms of their calorie content and didn't go into the same amount of depth about them.

My animal agriculture class on the other hand, was the first time I'd been taught in a class that the amount of nutrition absorbed from eating food varies depending on genetics, environmental factors, what the digestive system is accustomed to processing and what it was conditioned to process during development, and mechanical aspects of the digestion process like how much it is broken down by chewing (!!). Of course it was discussing these things from the point of view of like, cows, but it was really striking to me that I'd never been taught about human digestion from this point of view, where digestion is a complex process that can be affected by various biological and environmental factors.

At the beginning of the class we did a lab where we went over feedstuff analysis, and this was the first time I'd learned about where the numbers in nutrition labels come from, the kind of tests that are done to break food down to its components.

The class discussed how the digestibility of food was analyzed by testing the food, feeding animals the food, collecting the feces, and doing the same tests on the fecal matter to determine how much of the starting nutritional content was literally just going out the other end.

This raised a lot of questions for me: I don't think Pop-Tarts are analyzed by confining a human volunteer to a small room and feeding them only Pop-Tarts, then doing lab tests on their poop. Does that mean we know even less about feeding humans than we do animals? At any rate, nutrition labels would have to be rough estimates to begin with, and then accounting for the variability in the way bodies process food, it's even less descriptive.

Now i'm in plant agriculture, and I'm learning about the different types of proteins and fats and what plants and/or animals they come from. There are different types of protein with different sources. There are...nine? I think? different amino acids that have to be consumed in the diet, and different foods contain different ones?? The reason combinations of grains and legumes are so common as staple diets throughout the world, is that this is closest to being nutritionally complete for humans???

And also protein supplements are mostly useless unless you're an Olympian or something, because the body doesn't have a way to store protein for later. If you eat protein and your body doesn't have an immediate use for it, it just gets taken apart in your liver and you pee it out. Sports greatly increase your need for energy far more than they increase your need for protein, but everyone thinks you should eat a ton of protein as an athlete and that carbohydrates are unhealthy.

I learned from the same chapter WHY fiber is important to help digestion (having texture to the stuff in your gut stimulates peristalsis which is the muscular movements that push things along).

I feel really weird and resentful about health textbooks and classes now, because it feels like they didn't want us to have the facts on how our bodies work, and instead just taught us to see certain foods as "good" or "bad," as though it was more important to be afraid of "unhealthy" food than to understand why food is needed. Health classes barely teach why food is needed.

Like, vegetables are seen as the quintessential "healthy" food, but what is traditionally seen as "vegetables" are mainly important because they provide micronutrients, fiber, and water (the water content in food is actually a big deal). There's a reason they aren't staple foods. You need carbohydrates and fats to live. Period.

I say "what is traditionally seen as vegetables" because it's an incoherent category nutritionally. Beans, sweet potatoes, and spinach are doing very different things for your body. Are beans even a vegetable? Clearly "comes from a plant" isn't the main criteria since grains, nuts, and fruits aren't considered vegetables.

So like, the "myplate" graphic (and the "food pyramid" that came before it)? Total bullshit basically.

It's really frustrating how writings on healthy eating assume you are probably already eating too much or are at risk of overeating. I learned very young about the harms of being "overweight" and eating too much of a certain nutrient. But I just realized from my reading in the plant agriculture class that I had never read a resource that teaches in the same detail about the harms of undernutrition.

It's so easy to fail to get the nutrients you need, holy shit. Particularly protein, because it isn't one thing, it's a bunch of different types of molecule pieces that are found in varying amounts in different foods. People who eat animal products or soy don't have to worry about it very much, since they are essentially complete in terms of protein, but if you are a vegan who doesn't/can't eat soy as a staple, you HAVE to be careful to eat a variety of foods that complement each other in terms of what they're lacking. There's something called the PDCAAS that rates each food by the amino acids they contain, but generally the best idea is to eat a bunch of grains and legumes.

I'm not saying that people can be "scared straight" out of developing eating disorders. But I am saying that young people can benefit from being exposed to scary information when they have the power to possibly encounter situations where that information is applicable. And the horrifying realization of what starvation is and does is such an information.

My plant agriculture text explained that carbohydrates and fats are the basic sources of energy under normal circumstances, and that it takes around 1,600 kcal per day to run your internal organs. Protein is only used for energy in unusual circumstances. When fat reserves are exhausted and there isn't any food, the body starts breaking down proteins for calories—and the first ones to go are the ones that are already all throughout the bloodstream, found in YOUR ANTIBODIES. That's right, when you run out of fat to burn off, your body starts EATING ITS OWN IMMUNE SYSTEM.

The plant agriculture book also says that digestion and energy needs vary from person to person, like literally when different people eat the same meal their blood sugar rises different amounts, and that how the body decides to store energy or use energy stores is determined by complicated feedback loops controlled by hormones. Meanwhile the average person thinks that it's a matter of "eat too much = get fat and unhealthy, eat less = lose weight and be healthier" and even the college health class I took used more or less this model.

Like people are walking around with this completely wrong idea of how their bodies work and making AWFUL decisions based upon it because the resources they have to educate them think it's more important to...make people afraid of food? I don't think it's even common knowledge that the body burns most of the calories you consume just from existing. I want to chew concrete.

Why don't we teach everyone in school why staple foods are staple foods?! Not even getting into people who are so deep into eating disorders they think carrots have too much sugar, it's so normal to do things like "cut out bread" or "cut out carbs" (????!??!) and to perceive hunger as an innately untrustworthy thing, when genuine success at dieting like this is a great way to Corn On The Kill Yourself.

I'm just kind of reeling right now at how much research and monitoring it would take to safely diet in the ways people constantly attempt to diet with NO research NO supervision NO medical testing, 100% believing that they are doing something good for their health.

If people aren't taught what a macronutrient is and why you will die without it, they will think celery sticks are a "healthy" substitute for a chocolate chip cookie, and then not understand why they feel like shit.

Also... this is slightly different, but it's connected to the problem of "people not understanding what food does to the body". In the animal agriculture class, it was surprising to me how in livestock animals, things like muscle and fat composition are strongly genetically determined. All the modern breeds of cattle, pigs, chickens, etc. used in corporate farming have been bred to be very lean and have very little fat while having huge amounts of muscle tissue, because that's what the modern consumer wants in meat.

With pigs, a lot of older heritage pig breeds were bred to store most of what they ate as fat, because pigs were used to change food waste into lard that could be added to cooking for flavor and calories. And most of these breeds either went extinct or dwindled severely to be replaced by "meat" breed pigs that don't put on very much fat at all.

With humans, "everyone knows" that the amount of fat and muscle in your body comes from what you eat and how much you exercise. But a feedlot-finished beef cow that spends the last several months of its life doing nothing but gorging itself on carbohydrates will stay lean and put on muscle because it's genetically predisposed to.

It violates common sense and yet a multi-billion-dollar industry revolves around cramming animals into a small area without much room to do anything, feeding the animals whatever crap has the most calories in it, and ending up with a lean, muscular carcass.

fittingoutjane

Real metabolic studies of human beings have been done. Some researchers had people lie under hoods, seeing how much carbon dioxide they exhale while at rest. Others paid people to live in a sort of hospital for several weeks with their food intake monitored completely.

But all of these studies are very expensive to do, and there's an awful lot of nutrition and exercise "science" that's based on nothing of the sort.

mylordshesacactus

[physically sits on my hands to prevent myself from responding to the post going around about the Terror/Erebus and jokingly making fun of the idea that the names were responsible for their fates because nominative determinism in ships is genuinely a Thing both in nautical culture but also in practice and there are two separate reasons why ship-name superstitions are actually grounded in reality it's not something to mock--]

mylordshesacactus

Okay so I said "two separate reasons" which was wrong, it was late and I was tired. There's actually three reasons--the nautical-spiritual tradition, the psychological aspect, and the purely practical--and they're not entirely separate.

Reason 1: Practical

This first bit isn't directly relevant to the doomed Franklin expedition--I initially thought it was, but I was misremembering a story about HMS Polaris--but this is an explanation of nominative determinism in the nautical sphere as a whole, so. In short:

There is a very good reason why it's bad luck to rename a ship.

nateconnolly

Huge shout to my friend from an undergraduate philosophy program who started working out every single day, not for health benefits or to become conventionally attractive or whatever, but because -- and this is a direct quote -- he was concerned that otherwise he might "become lost in the world of signs and forget the things they signify". I have thought about this every single time that I've worked out since.

some-pers0n

Going feral rn I just found this spectacular high school performance of a BioShock musical and I already thought it was amazing already before then being JUMPSCARED by this spectacular cover of Mr Capgras. I had to see it, so you do too.

Here's the full performance. It's around 20 minutes long. This song is around the 9:20 mark.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Zerotonin