last summer, a stray in our neighborhood had a litter of kittens, and she entrusted us to look after them. we tried for months to find them homes (shelters in our area were full, or don’t accept animals from where we live specifically), and ultimately we ended up taking in all five (5!) kittens she had - three males (thermador, tim, tony) and two females (tyra and tappan).
in recent months we’ve been slammed with a number of high costs (a furniture need in the living room, i had to buy a set of new tires for the car i’m still paying off for about $640 all in after taxes and fees (about $140ish per tire) but hope to pay down significantly with my peanuts yearly bonus i have coming at the end of the month, spent $660 on an exhaust replacement (got a relatively good deal from name dropping at a garage we were recommended to go to luckily!), and i still need to get a tie rod fixed for the final thing to have the car pass inspection, and a handful of other misc costs), so we just haven’t been able to save up the money to get all five babies fixed. if it weren’t for the car’s inspection repair needs, i could’ve covered them getting fixed handily, but those car needs were expensive and have tapped me out (car sufferers you understand 😔). they’ll be 10 months old this month, and the girls have just entered their first heat. we want to ideally get the girls fixed first, and then the boys. there is a mobile spay/neuter clinic that visits our town a few thursdays a month - the cost for spay/neuter at that mobile van is $90/cat, which is extremely affordable compared to vets. that’s the whole goal of the van - its sponsored by rescues and other orgs, with certain orgs partnering with it based on location and the overall cost being determined by that.
with the cost of everything i am still trying to pay off or have yet to pay for (and other household things), i just don’t have the bandwidth or ability to try to set aside money for the cats without putting something else at risk. money, work, and costs have been a huge stressor for months. i’m figuring out a way to pay for everything else, but the cats i’ve been scratching my head about - I work, but my mother is disabled and on a fixed income (social security), so hefty costs all at once instead of being pieced out can be difficult. but they need fixed, and while their home is with us, the spay/neuter is a final hurdle for them. they’re truly the sweetest and happiest bunch i’ve ever seen besides that. if anyone is able to help out with the cost, that’d be so appreciated!! times are tough for everyone but knowing that need is taken care of would be a huge relief. putting pictures of them here would make the post way too big but i can always share pictures if asked, i have a million of them 😩
GOAL: $90x2 (for the girls) = $160. $90x3 (for the boys) = $270. we want to get the girls fixed first, but if we can figure out all five, that’s great too! (it’d be $430 altogether)
PAYPAL: ironheading (meme cat icon w a phone) / VENMO: eurodynes (meme cat icon throwing a brick)
so far i’ve raised $30 to help with the cats! while i’m super grateful for those of you that have helped so far, anything else you’re willing or able to help with is appreciated too!
i love this because it’s like. why did paleolithic peoples paint the hunt. perhaps to celebrate and honour brave deeds that kept the community alive. perhaps to bring luck for future hunts. perhaps to instruct those who came after how to slay the beast. perhaps to remind us we can: that the mammoth is not unkillable.
hey people into the PWHL does anyone know where I can find good pictures of players outside of the Victoire? they’re insta always has good pics but I can’t find good ones on the others, i wanted to make some graphics for other teams!
I have fallen back in love with making posters, so here’s some I’ve been making recently. I’ve got a bunch more in the works, not sorry that they are ALL hockey related.
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.
Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can’t get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.
May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.
I do think this could be useful for writers! …Caveat, if you’re going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it’s only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it’ll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.
One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you’re familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we’ve got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.
Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That’s because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.
This is a short free introduction to the concept: “Notes on Landscape Archaeology.” To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like…studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.
Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the “construct paradigm” of a landscape from settlement ecology,
ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.
And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:
Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes
are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and
organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments …
Landscapes are worlds of cultural product … Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform
physical spaces into meaningful places. …
Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the
milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place
contexts …
Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each
generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning …
Basically a “landscape” is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like… Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it’s like…I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it’s easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.
Also:
This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.
(Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn’t try to read every essay.)
If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he’s in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta’s methodology!
