dear americans,

as a polish queer woman and human rights activist, i know exactly how you're feeling right now and what to expect from these elections. i lived through the 2015-2023 regime of pis, a right-wing populist party that divided families in the same way trump did. i’ve experienced the rise of fascism in poland, the influence of far-right parties like konfederacja, and their “santa’s little helpers”—ordo iuris, an ultra-conservative catholic organization (banned in many countries, mind you) that helped enforce a near-total abortion ban and runs anti-queer campaigns in public spaces. i supported the black protests in 2016 as a middle schooler when they first tried to ban abortion. as an adult, i actively participated in the 2020 women’s strike, running from police tear gas daily after they finally passed the ban. i supported friends who faced charges.

i’ve lived through intense homophobia in poland as a queer teen and adult. i survived the first pride march in my hometown, where far-right extremists threw stones and glass at us. i endured the anti-queer propaganda spread by the ruling party in state-owned media. i survived the “rainbow night,” poland’s own stonewall moment in summer 2020, when police arrested around 50 queer activists following the arrest of margo, a nonbinary activist. i survived the "lgbt-free zones," the targeted violence, the slurs from strangers on the street, and the protests i held against queerphobia. it was hard as fuck, but i survived.

but just because i survived, it doesn’t mean others did. many women died because of the abortion ban—marta, justyna, izabela, dorota, joanna, maria, and many others who didn’t survive pis’s draconian anti-abortion laws. milo, kacper, michał, zuzia (she was 12), wiktor, and other queer and trans kids and young adults took their own lives because of the relentless queerphobia.

despite all of this, our experience in poland can serve as a guide now. here are some tips for staying safe and how we, polish queers and women, organized under the regime:

if i forgot to (or didn't) include something, don't hesitate to reblog this post with other resources.

If you're new to having to think about your security, this walk through of how to develop a security plan is pretty good.

i finished them!!! a full playable balatro deck based on the FL playing cards!

and if you want to download them yourself:

have fun!!

Gnu - Question for native speakers

Guys, why do you call Terry Pratchett either a type of antelope or an astroid?

It was called the lucky clacks tower, Tower 181. It was close enough to the town of Bonk for a man to be able to go and get a hot bath and a good bed on his days off, but since this was Überwald there wasn’t too much local traffic and - this was important - it was way, way up in the mountains and management didn’t like to go that far. In the good old days of last year, when the Hour of the Dead took place every night, it was a happy tower because both the up-line and the down-line got the Hour at the same time, so there was an extra pair of hands for maintenance. Now Tower 181 did maintenance on the fly or not at all, just like all the others, but it was still, proverbially, a good tower to man. 

Mostly man, anyway. Back down on the plains it was a standing joke that 181 was staffed by vampires and werewolves. In fact, like a lot of towers, it was often manned by kids. 

Everyone knew it happened. Actually, the new management probably didn’t, but wouldn’t have done anything about it if they’d found out, apart from carefully forgetting that they’d known. Kids didn’t need to be paid. 

The - mostly - young men on the towers worked hard in all weathers for just enough money. They were loners, hard dreamers, fugitives from the law that the law had forgotten, or just from everybody else. They had a special kind of directed madness; they said the rattle of the clacks got into your head and your thoughts beat time with it so that sooner or later you could tell what messages were going through by listening to the rattle of the shutters. In their towers they drank hot tea out of strange tin mugs, much wider at the bottom so that they didn’t fall over when gales banged into the tower. On leave, they drank alcohol out of anything. And they talked a gibberish of their own, of donkey and nondonkey, system overhead and packet space, of drumming it and hotfooting, of a 181 (which was good) or flock (which was bad) or totally flocked (really not good at all) and plug-code and hog-code and jacquard …

And they liked kids, who reminded them of the ones they’d left behind or would never have, and kids loved the towers. They’d come and hang around and do odd jobs and maybe pick up the craft of semaphore just by watching. They tended to be bright, they mastered the keyboard and levers as if by magic, they usually had good eyesight and what they were doing, most of them, was running away from home without actually leaving.

Because, up on the towers, you might believe you could see to the rim of the world. You could certainly see several other towers, on a good clear day. You pretended that you too could read messages by listening to the rattle of the shutters, while under your fingers flowed the names of faraway places you’d never see but, on the tower, were somehow connected to …

She was known as Princess to the men on Tower 181, although she was really Alice. She was thirteen, could run a line for hours on end without needing help, and later on would have an interesting career which … but anyway, she remembered this one conversation, on this day, because it was strange. Not all the signals were messages. Some were instructions to towers. 

Some, as you operated your levers to follow the distant signal, made things happen in your own tower. Princess knew all about this. A lot of what travelled on the Grand Trunk was called the Overhead. It was instructions to towers, reports, messages about messages, even chatter between operators, although this was strictly forbidden these days. It was all in code. It was very rare you got Plain in the Overhead. But now …

‘There it goes again,’ she said. ‘It must be wrong. It’s got no origin code and no address. It’s Overhead, but it’s in Plain.’

On the other side of the tower, sitting in a seat facing the opposite direction because he was operating the up-line, was Roger, who was seventeen and already working for his tower-master certificate. 

His hand didn’t stop moving as he said: ‘What did it say?’ 

‘There was GNU, and I know that’s a code, and then just a name. It was John Dearheart. Was it a—’ 

‘You sent it on?’ said Grandad. Grandad had been hunched in the corner, repairing a shutter box in this cramped shed halfway up the tower. Grandad was the tower-master and had been everywhere and knew everything. Everyone called him Grandad. He was twenty-six. He was always doing something in the tower when she was working the line, even though there was always a boy in the other chair. She didn’t work out why until later. 

‘Yes, because it was a G code,’ said Princess. ‘Then you did right. Don’t worry about it.’ 

‘Yes, but I’ve sent that name before. Several times. Upline and downline. Just a name, no message or anything!’ 

She had a sense that something was wrong, but she went on: ‘I know a U at the end means it has to be turned round at the end of the line, and an N means Not Logged.’ This was showing off, but she’d spent hours reading the cypher book. ‘So it’s just a name, going up and down all the time! Where’s the sense in that?’ 

Something was really wrong. Roger was still working his line, but he was staring ahead with a thunderous expression. 

Then Grandad said: ‘Very clever, Princess. You’re dead right.’ ‘Hah!’ said Roger. 

‘I’m sorry if I did something wrong,’ said the girl meekly. ‘I just thought it was strange. Who’s John Dearheart?’ 

‘He … fell off a tower,’ said Grandad. 

‘Hah!’ said Roger, working his shutters as if he suddenly hated them.

‘He’s dead?’ said Princess. 

‘Well, some people say—’ Roger began. 

‘Roger!’ snapped Grandad. It sounded like a warning. 

‘I know about Sending Home,’ said Princess. ‘And I know the souls of dead linesmen stay on the Trunk.’ 

‘Who told you that?’ said Grandad. 

Princess was bright enough to know that someone would get into trouble if she was too specific. 

‘Oh, I just heard it,’ she said airily. ‘Somewhere.’ 

‘Someone was trying to scare you,’ said Grandad, looking at Roger’s reddening ears. 

It hadn’t sounded scary to Princess. If you had to be dead, it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground. But she was bright enough, too, to know when to drop a subject. 

It was Grandad who spoke next, after a long pause broken only by the squeaking of the new shutter bars. When he did speak, it was as if something was on his mind. ‘We keep that name moving in the Overhead,’ he said, and it seemed to Princess that the wind in the shutter arrays above her blew more forlornly, and the everlasting clicking of the shutters grew more urgent. ‘He’d never have wanted to go home. He was a real linesman. His name is in the code, in the wind in the rigging and the shutters. Haven’t you ever heard the saying “A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken”?’

- From Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

tl;dr: “gnu” is a term of respect from Sir Pratchett’s books that means “keep saying their name, keep saying their name.”

The really great thing is, it wasn’t planned.

After Terry Pratchett died, “GNU Terry Pratchett” started flying all over the internet. Tweets, Tumblrs, blogposts. People emailed and DMed each other with the news and the message. Coders for websites and blogs put the message into their code so that  “GNU Terry Pratchett” could never be removed from the internet. Sir Terry’s daughter said that she was astonished–that no one had expected this. 

Sir Terry’s fans found a way of using his own writing to memorialize him. To say, We love you. We remember you. And we won’t let you be forgotten.

That message is still true.

you can only reblog this today

Golden rule of thumb for art kids: reblogging Bob Ross will bless you latest work

I’m confused, aren’t those switched? I thought entropy was going from chaotic life to orderly death, from hot and moving to cold and still.

I think the confusion is the point this piece is trying to make.

No, the whole point is that your default reaction is to go “but the bottom one is ordered!” because it looks neat and human. Ignoring the order of nature, where things may look strange to us but have their place.

Chaos is a city block, with straight lines on a landscape, regardless of what was there before. Order is a beautiful fractal of streams turning into rivers, turning into the sea

Order is functional, Chaos is when nothing connects to what it needs to.

More ⬇️⬇️⬇️

30+ year old women are the backbone of this website

reblog if you're literally 30+

I'm doing a big graphic design project that involves watching several thousand anime openings and I realized there's a lot of things that show up a lot in anime OPs.

So I made a 7 minute long AMV about it.

Full video here.

#somewhere the megatokyo guy just woke up in a cold sweat and has no idea why

artfight attack for @draciachan! the character is sister triskrina (+ gideon + a painting of jod) from her fic giggle

stills + without the gas + without the skull paint under the cut

Astronaut Mark Kelly smuggled a gorilla suit into the ISS, without telling the rest of the crew

Winston

Winston

My favourite incident like this was the Skylab 4 mission, where the crew arrived at the empty station, only to find several people already inside, to their great alarm. Upon investigating, they realized the intruders were wearing the Skylab 3 mission patches… and were also just dummies the Skylab 3 crew had made and left there without telling anyone, specifically to fuck with the next team.

Can you imagine entering a supposedly empty space station and seeing this? Fucking terrifying. I love it.

I’m just impressed that, in an environment where weight and available resources are so carefully accounted for, people still find windows to pull bullshit like this.

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

Homie gonna share this

hungry,,,

ROLL FOR DELICIOUS! 🍄🍳🍽️

Make a Dungeon Meshi OC with me! If you use this template tag it with #DungeonMeshiOC so I can see them all!

Rebloggin for future ref

Artbook collection Master-post

Dorohedoro MUD AND SLUDGE + Dorohedoro Sketch Book 'Day Dream Hour' Artbooks 1-5 by Ryōko Kui (Dungeon Meshi) Delicious in Dungeon Adventurer's Bible world guide

Witch Hat Atelier Special Edition Volume 02 + 06 Artbooks Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou - Book of Paintings + Postcard Book "BLAME! and so on" Artbook

The Art of Ponyo The Art of The Wind Rises The Art of Kiki's Delivery Service

The Art of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind Miyazaki Moebius exhibition catalog The Art of Moebius

"Der Mond" Neon Genesis Evangelion Artbook "EYES ONLY" SPY×FAMILY Official Fanbook The Art of Fullmetal Alchemist 1 + 2

Elden Ring Art Book Volume 1 + 2 Dark Souls 1-3 Design Works Bloodborne Official Artworks

SEKIRO - SHADOWS DIE TWICE Official Artworks Grimoire Nier + NieR Art – Kazuma Koda Art Collection

The art of Alice Madness Returns SCORN The art of the Game The FLCL Archives

The Art of Metal Gear Solid I - IV - Gallery Works and Studio Works Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse -The Art of the Movie Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse The Art of the Movie

The Artwork of Berserk Alphonse Mucha's "Figures Decoratives" AKIRA Club

The art of Nimona

Here's a link to the entire collection, in case any of the individual links are broken.

This post will also be edited as more Artbooks are added, check this link for the up-to-date version.

Update: Added "The Complete Daydream Hour"

@septemberlikestea donated me one of his unfinished sketches at the time of need and I'm forever grateful 💋💋💋

Recent colored comms March waitlist is open btw! am taking 5 more starts from second week onwards