I'm done!!!

Every post (excepting a few that I deliberately left untagged, and probably some I missed) is tagged!

Now that I'm finished with this, I'm going to taking a break from tumblr, so I probably won't be active for a while. Everything's fine, I've just got other stuff going on that I need to focus on.

While I'm gone, though, I will be leaving a list of all my tags! People may try and figure out what they mean, and when I return, I will post a list of all the meanings behind them.

I'm back! I have updated the taglist to include the meanings.

People who co-write fiction together are very brave. If a coauthor tries to change a word the wrong way in our scientific article I want to confiscate their fingers.

I want to try so many little hobbies. Candle making, soap making, basket weaving, wood carving, book binding, baking, weaving, I want to try them all.

I almost made a post about this the other day (unless i actually did and totally forgot) but there’s so many

I was going to make a list, but then i realized this is a good time to share this book

Making Stuff and Doing things is a whole collection of old punk DIY zines about making and doing just about anything, even things you probably never knew you wanted to do.

Book binding? In there.

Making bowls from old vinyl records? I made a whole ton for my brother’s grad party last year.

Basics of guitar? Making rubber stamps? Silk screening? Composting? Homemade beer, root beer, and wine? Soymilk?? Quill pens??? All in there.

Since it’s more punk, it doesn’t have a ton of the folksy, cottage vibes/hobbies, but it’s all about being resourceful and sustainable, which they both have in common.

If i ever need to do anything I’m not sure of, I double check this book to see if there’s anything in there. It’s one of the only books on diy I’ve ever needed.

You can download the entire book as a PDF in the link above.

What able bodied authors think I, an amputee and a wheelchair user, would want in a scifi setting:

What I actually want:

A few additions I remember seeing in the comments on my old account:

TLDR: Stop assuming every disabled person would want to be as close to "normal" as possible in your works. Some absolutely would and having options for them if fine, but I rarely see any examples of media showing those of us who don't. start letting amputees in your scifi works have fun with our prosthetics, fix the problems real amputees are already talking about instead of what you think are the issues and make your settings as a whole accessible!

Do you think people used to have ADHD Text Reply Anxiety back in the day. Do you think there was some girl in the 1870s going "Oh, a letter from Esther, how delightful! I must make time to write her a reply this evening!" And then later she was like "It has been 5 months since Esther wrote me, and I am yet to reply. I fear I have tarried far too long, and if she receives a letter from me now it will seem terribly rude and she will want nothing to do with me. And yet, it is ruder still to not write her at all! I fear I am the only one to blame for my current predicament, as I am most terribly forgetful. Ah, but what a fool I am! I shall pray this evening for guidance from the Lord"

I once took a whole-ass college course that was focused on literature in letter form (European epistolary) and we kicked off our reading assignments in the 1700s and I can verify that yes, you are correct.

Oh my god my mom read me a quote from ben franklin the other day that was like "sorry i put off replying to your letter for two months. the vibes were gross"

hello vampire sickos, particularly dracula sickos, let's talk about medieval manuscripts. I'm not sure how familiar bram stoker would have been with late gothic religious movements and popular worship, but in the latter portion of the middle ages there was a big, widely practiced, and officially ecclesiastically endorsed push for lay people and the clergy to form personal emotional connections with christ and the virgin by just getting like stupidly horny about them. you've got personal devotional texts with illustrations of a completely nude christ displaying his long willowy limbs and coquettishly asking a nun to penetrate his side wound with her huge fuck-off spear, you've got monks imagining sculptures of the crucifixion coming to life to make out with them and christ our lord liking it so much that he opens his mouth to add a little tongue action, it was a great time to be a freak.

this is relevant to dracula because the intense love of mary for her sensual maternality transferred somewhat onto jesus, and people began to view him not just as an aspect of god the father but also as god the mother, nurturing and ever loving. if jesus died on the cross for our sake, then his body can be seen as nourishment for humanity, his blood being not unlike her breast milk, and I know what you're thinking right now, you're thinking "marina, the sacrament of the eucharist and the idea of drinking christ's blood through wine is obviously vampiric, you aren't saying anything revelatory, this is entry level vampire freakism and not particularly relevant to dracula," but I would like to show you this illumination of saint catherine of siena's vision of drinking from christ's side wound:

(life of saint catherine of siena, fifteenth century, german)

which is a pose that I think should maybe be ringing some bells for dracula likers

I fucking love Venn diagrams.

This Made Me Uncomfortable

don’t bring a splayd to a knork fight. 

HE’S GOT A SPIFE

it's not just about love

Anything you can remember! I'm mainly just curious about how far your interests range.

okay so. a verbatim fandom remembering, through all my five plus years of it:

okay that’s my 124 isat drafts done :)

Hands down my fave thing about hurricane season is when zoos put their birds in the bathroom to protect them from the wind and we get images like this

Photo from St Augustine Alligator Farm

my handsewn trawlerman quilt!

some wip pics and thoughts under the cut

this is your periodic reminder that for all the artifacts and errors and "tells" one could possibly list, the only reliable way to actually determine if an image is ai generated is to investigate the source. it is becoming increasingly common for "fake classical paintings" to circulate around curative aesthetic blogs, and everyone should be using this as an opportunity to not only exercise their investigative skills but also appreciate art more in general. you're all checking out the artists you reblog, right? 🫣

so what are some signs to look for? let's use this very good example.

All very good points!

Also, while AI and digital tools are pretty darn good at imitating traditional media, there should be more interaction of the brush with the canvas, at least until the 20th century when artists start using all kinds of media.

Online reproductions of traditional paintings aren't always detailed, and some painters smooth out their strokes and edges or pile on enough paint to hide the weave of the canvas, but I still feel like digital tools attempting to recreate oil painting are too uniform, missing subtle irregularities of line and hue since one keeps having to mix more colors unless you buy a gazillion different tubes.

Look at my boy Cézanne, varying stroke thickness, paint opacity, obviousness of his brushwork, leaving irregular little flecks. He wasn't focused on drawing, but color — he realized that a dress could look yellow and blue to our eyes, so he used warm and cool modulations of the same color, a technique most painters after him adopted more or less.

The AI generated image tries to mimic some of these methods, like the varying thickness of brush strokes, but it's random. Why do some edges get dark outlines but others not? Why are most of the highlights the same brush size? Why is the painting blank between the central man's legs? Why is there so little shading or color variation to suggest the 3 dimensional forms of the body?

Some more examples of real paintings from the Art Authority app vs AI...

Finally replacing my header: some flags made of podcasts I've enjoyed listening to

Not my flags, but I couldn't resist giving them a go. I allowed doubles between them this time, since there's only so many pink covers.

A purely ace one I made for @acepodcastweek.

Regrettably I wasn't able to make it entirely from shows featuring ace characters, but just over a third of them isn't bad.

Scientific fraud is the most baffling thing ever to me like do they think they're just going to make a huge breakthrough and no one will notice that it's fake by trying to replicate their results

Yeah actually I just discovered how to turn plastic into gold. Oh you want to know how I did it

Starts running away cutely

Went into a worldbuilding haze at work and put together a system of medieval coinage on the silver standard that uses the US Standard Survey Units renamed and changed from length measures to weight measures, so we can both have a highly divisible and apparently idiosyncratic imperial system of coinage, without ripping off the British all the time. And the best part is that nobody knows the US Standard Survey Units save for a very particular subsection of nerd.

And because I hate happiness and friendship, I mixed it with metric just to be an asshole. So the coinage proportions are bizarre and eclectic imperial ones, but their are all based on grams and kilograms of silver. And gold, but its more a convenience factor for state purchases for states without a sophisticated financial system, because carrying around 24 kg of silver metal is really fucking heavy.

Details below the cut

My mentor: I wanna do a wall garden, because it doesnt take up too much space

Me, already vibrating from the dopamine and adrenaline: Let's talk about espaliers

okay, so espaliers are beyond sexy, they are so unbelievably productive

The basics are just... pruning growing trees so they are more 2 dimensional, usually placed against walls. It takes a few years to form/ raise, but they are much easier to maintain than free growing trees in the long run.

(source)

Not only is it more accessible, easier to harvest fruit, but the design has a double purpose; the walls hold and release heat that can keep warm-weathered plants alive during Northen winters!

There are people who use this method to grow avocado, fig, etc trees outdoors without electricity in -20C weather.

A similar technique to espalier can be used to grow furniture without killing the tree!