i don't know where i'll go if/when tumblr dies. :////

I don't use my existing twitter because i don't understand the culture and it feels very exposed and uncozy. it feels mostly like somewhere to advertise your stuff. i mean i used it to stalk a few grimmichi artists a few years back but not really to post with, it's dead now.

i did make a bluesky (askerian) but it feels very similar to twitter so far and i have no idea how to socialize there. but y'all are welcome to add me, i just don't remember to check it very often.

i also made a pillowfort but i then promptly forgot to check on it because p much everybody i followed there is also here. it's the most likely so far because i like the setup which is fairly similar to tumblr.

my AO3 is here

basically if i'm not askerian i'm asukaskerian and if neither one is there then i'm not on that site.

i'm also askerian on discord but since they changed everything with the id numbers i don't know how to help people find me... hrmhh.

where else is a good site? >_>

I use Dreamwidth but I was talking with my friend about some of the downsides of that.

Like how, Twitter and BS style is "shouting into the abyss, and if no one hears you right away your message disappears forever".

Tumblr casts a boat out onto the ocean. Maybe it'll sink and be lost, maybe someone will find it years from now.

DW is sitting alone in a room playing with your toys and sometimes people come in and watch you, and talk for a bit, but then wander off. Your friends come to visit regularly but most people don't know you're even there.

DW's main downsides for me are A. The compartmentalization of it all. You can't spread other people's posts. You can link to them, talk about them, but you can't reblog. B. Very limited capacity for image hosting, and you can't upload directly into a post. You have to go to the special image upload place, then link it.

(For anyone interested, my DW is linked in my pinned post but also here have it again: https://dreadlordmrson.dreamwidth.org/)

yeah! i love the posting aspects of DW but if i want to show my followers something cool i have to create my own post with a link toward the cool thing and some ramble about it to convince them instead of shooting it directly into their eyeballs. (or i could steal the art and repost it as though it's my own, which is evil and bad.)

also this: This page displays only the most recent 1000 entries posted within the last 14 days.

what IF i went on vacation! what if i found something super cool that's older than 14 days!! too bad, it's lost, unless somebody finds you cool enough to archive crawl and then... promptly keep their findings to themself.

i havent used DW in years other than for my monthly word count post. it's cool for intimate journaling and the comment format on posts is nice but it's so hard to be inquisitive and outgoing on it. it's askerian though.

Yeah DW's main for of discovering people is through sharing communities... and I have trouble having enough energy and attention to spend a lot of time active on even one community....

Man your DW tags reminding me of all those old fandoms I used to read fics for though. I should reread some of these, like the GG psychic wolves series.

i don't know where i'll go if/when tumblr dies. :////

I don't use my existing twitter because i don't understand the culture and it feels very exposed and uncozy. it feels mostly like somewhere to advertise your stuff. i mean i used it to stalk a few grimmichi artists a few years back but not really to post with, it's dead now.

i did make a bluesky (askerian) but it feels very similar to twitter so far and i have no idea how to socialize there. but y'all are welcome to add me, i just don't remember to check it very often.

i also made a pillowfort but i then promptly forgot to check on it because p much everybody i followed there is also here. it's the most likely so far because i like the setup which is fairly similar to tumblr.

my AO3 is here

basically if i'm not askerian i'm asukaskerian and if neither one is there then i'm not on that site.

i'm also askerian on discord but since they changed everything with the id numbers i don't know how to help people find me... hrmhh.

where else is a good site? >_>

I use Dreamwidth but I was talking with my friend about some of the downsides of that.

Like how, Twitter and BS style is "shouting into the abyss, and if no one hears you right away your message disappears forever".

Tumblr casts a boat out onto the ocean. Maybe it'll sink and be lost, maybe someone will find it years from now.

DW is sitting alone in a room playing with your toys and sometimes people come in and watch you, and talk for a bit, but then wander off. Your friends come to visit regularly but most people don't know you're even there.

DW's main downsides for me are A. The compartmentalization of it all. You can't spread other people's posts. You can link to them, talk about them, but you can't reblog. B. Very limited capacity for image hosting, and you can't upload directly into a post. You have to go to the special image upload place, then link it.

(For anyone interested, my DW is linked in my pinned post but also here have it again: https://dreadlordmrson.dreamwidth.org/)

matt just fired half the remaining tumblr support staff lmao

from my sources adjacent to tumblr--from which i can spread rumors and insider information freely because i dont give a fuck about ever working in the tech sector--im hearing this round of firings was focused on purging the senior staff, and not just from support but from the entire remaining tumblr workforce. i'm hearing there are about 25 people left.

guys im gonna be real with you. i dont think its progressive to say “men only write smut where everyone fucks all the time for no reason and that’s bad, but women write smut that’s not even focused on sex and that’s better <3” you realize how weird you sound right. why do you think women don’t write nasty horny scenes about being rawdogged. and furthermore, why are you positioning the ‘more pure’ version of smut that’s Not Even Really About Sex as the better one.

the idea that women are “too good” to write sex scenes that are just about fucking for fucking’s sake is completely detached from reality, and i sentence you to stand in the bodice-ripper section of your local bookstore for 8 hours. you really need to deconstruct this idea we’re all taught that “horny = men = bad”. you sound catholic.

people will say this shit as if fifty shades of grey wasnt one of the most profitable book of the last decade. where have you been. actually, don’t answer that, i already know that the answer is “laughing at the women who thought 50 shades was sexy, especially if they were older than you”

I cannot stress enough that all those things in sewing pattern instructions that seem pointless are actually very important

Yes, how you fold your fabric before putting down the pattern pieces and cutting matters, because it influences how the fabric drapes, and ignoring that can cause fit issues in ways you wouldn't expect

Yes, cutting an entire separate piece to sew to the edge to finish it is going to be better than turning the edge and stitching it on its own, because there are geometry issues in play that make it actually harder to just fold a curve to the inside.

Yes, cutting clips or notches into the seam allowance around curves should always be done, because those geometry issues will work on the seam allowances and keep the curve from laying flat (remember, clip when the curve goes in, notch when the curve goes out)

Yes, interfacing may seem completely superfluous and frustrating and an extra step to work with, but it adds rigidity and stability to areas that need it (especially under buttons)

Yes, using a fun quilting cotton print for lining looks nice, but the point of lining isn't to make the inside pretty as much as it is to make the inside slip smoothly over the layer under it, and quilting cotton is going to instead be prone to grabbing everything under it, so you really should use those annoyingly slippery lining fabrics

Yes, in general, you should use the kind of fabric the pattern tells you to use, because there have been centuries, if not millennia, of people throughout the entire world figuring out what fabric best suits what kind of garment, for reasons beyond aesthetics

I know that a lot of people new to sewing see these things and feel like they're things that just aren't necessary, because they skip them when they sew and the item ends up just fine. And if you don't mind the idea of your clothes looking homemade, then it is fine. But...if you're consistently skipping these things and end up unhappy with how homemade your items look, please consider that that result is at least partly because you're not following the entire directions

"Sewing" involves so much more than just the stitches

All this is true, but I will say: people will tell you not to make shirts out of quilting cotton, even though quilting cotton has BY FAR the best and most fun patterns.

Is it as good as fabrics designed for shirts? No. (My personal favs for winter are a cotton sateen with some stretch, and for summer a nice linen, if you must know, but I often use cotton double gauze for summer, too.)

Can you make a perfectly good button-down shirt out of it that will last you 5+ years of regular use? YES. I've made several. It's fine. Wash the fabric with super hot water and dry on hot first to make sure it's not going to shrink on you. The shirts last longer if you hang them to dry but that's true of most things.

If what you are looking for out of making your own shirts is The Most Fun Shirts Possible, use the quilting cotton.

Oh, yeah, quilting cotton makes fun shirts! People just need to be aware that it does not always make a soft and drapy shirt XD

A "menswear style" button-up shirt will probably work out fine in even the sturdiest quilting cottons. If the shirt's goal is to be soft and flowing, then the weight of the fabric becomes more important.

"Button up shirt made from quilting cotton = fabulous" versus "Button up shirt that, If I had made it in quilting cotton, probably would have looked--and felt--like a tent"

Of course, if "shirt that is a tent" is your goal, that's fine! It's all about being aware of all the things beyond print/color that the fabric contributes to the finished item.

One field that badly needs to be purged of "Great Man-ism" is architecture.

In my hometown there's a hospital that won awards for the brilliant architectural vision of the great man who designed it.

The fact that even before it opened they'd begun building the extension, because it was too small to accommodate the number of patients, and even then too small to accommodate visitors, apparently didn't matter.

Standard "visionary design"

I've worked in multiple award-winning buildings, and every one of them was a terrible work environment. Confusing internal layouts, bad HVAC, inaccessible spaces, lacking basic amenities, horrible acoustics, just bad places to work all around.

But hey, the lines of the buildings look great from the outside.

there was an award-winning building at my college that, due to its oddly-curved roof, every year, produced icicles that could kill people

I worked as an admin for 2 months at a multiple award-winning architectural firm. When I got to see a restaurant design in progress, I pointed out that the design of the bar in said restaurant would end up causing injuries to the workers. I was told that I didn't know what I was talking about.

I had left bartending to go to that job and I left that job to go back to bartending.

The fact that everyone has a story like this and yet architects are still allowed to ply their trade as if they were visionary artistic geniuses rather than glorified contractors with ideas above their station will never cease to grate my gears. Why do we, collectively, tolerate this bullshit?

Never gonna forget that episode of Grand Designs where the architect no longer wanted his name assosciated with the build because the folks who were going to live in it (and are paying to have it built...) raised the garage roof line high enough to be able to fit their regular-sized car into the garage.

I have basically been radicalized into feeling like architecture as a field is full of a lot of people who want to make really big sculptures and make other people pay for it. (There is also livable architecture. But when I look at architecture magazines, all I see are malevolent staircases that will murder you.)

nothing more disappointing than a shower with low water pressure. i don't want to feel like a wet sad beast left out in the rain i want to be power washed.

Attempting the William Tell shot!

Please note: this is a stunt performed by a professional with a lot of safety precautions! Do not attempt!

To see some of the behind the scenes, or support my videos in general, please check out Patreon

Strong Recommendations

1) Post your non-Tumblr socmed info on Tumblr tagged #contact or something OR send copies privately to anyone you want to have it.

2) Take similar steps on other social media where you want to keep in contact with people.

3) Save copies of other people's contact info on your phone/PC/tablet/etc. Like, you want a local address book, that you can access offline. Reblogging or saving a link doesn't help when a site suddenly goes down or does a mass purge.

whenever fandom proposes rewrites to a work or suggestions of what a work should've done instead or pitches for how to fix things, no matter what fandom it is, no matter how mid or even actively bad the original work is, a minimum 80% of the proposals are somehow SIGNIFICANTLY more godawful than whatever it is they're claiming to fix

#that what the readers *want* is not what the story *needs* #you gotta learn to think in the way of stories to see what the story needs.

Additionally! What might make for a "better" story overall, might not be best for THIS story and it's goals.

I keep seeing people rag on Valdemar for certain details and suggesting changes that. Well. They'd "improve" the worldbuilding and such but. I've been rereading Valdemar lately? And being reminded that Valdemar is chasing a specific audience and trying to do specific things with that audience. And maybe the story would be "better", but it would be further away from it's GOAL.

I’m very excited for my latest craft experiment, where I rhythmically slap sale rank oil paint onto a canvas and I see how long it takes to dry so that I can finally touch the paint textures I stare at so longingly in museums. 12 hours in, still wet. I am beginning to think this might take longer than I thought which you can imagine is quite a burden, as I am absolutely horned up to rub this paint.

You guys sound like you know what you’re talking about but I’m gonna touch it every twenty minutes just to be sure

I’ve put this canvas to age in the basement like a fine wine, along another recent masterpiece of mine “I put the paint on me hand and I slap the canvas like a bongo”

Paint slapped on 6/9, as of 6/22 (I mean actually it was a couple days ago but I didn’t fully check the dryness then so I can’t be sure):

It is rubbery feeling and the peaks of paint move when you flick them. The texture is not at ALL what I expected tbh and it makes me excited to try a different experiment, thick brush strokes, you know, those mad thicc ones that swirl real good

Here’s an additional shot with my coffee cup for a further sense of scale so people will understand that these canvases are small and therefore stop sending me asks about my supposedly gorilla sized hands, you bastards, you rotten bastards scared of the hands your minds gave me

I don’t know shit about art but isn’t this like a great example of art that pushes the boundaries of what art is? Like you’ve got your canvas with paint on it, but your reason for putting the paint there is totally different than why most people put paint on stuff. It’s like a study on texture or something.

Agreed, this is really cool and also I love the fact that you really wanted to touch some paint, so you just went out and bought a bunch of paint and made your own painting for touching purposes. That’s striking me as really really cool right now for reasons I can’t entirely articulate. 

For reference: Really thick paint on a piece of art is called impasto. Another really fun way to do it is with a painting knife: you can make each stroke SUPER SMOOTH like cake icing, but with visible, touchable texture between the strokes.

More impasto:

art by Jan Ironside, who does THICK IMPASTO FLOWERS THAT I SO WANT TO TOUCH

You LITERALLY sat down to watch paint dry…

Museums should have stuff like this on display JUST so you can touch it. With a sign like, “Feel me up! I won’t alarm!”

make good art

Only thing about thick impasto is that the paint can get a bit sharp sometimes. Like, I’ve cut my hand on dried impasto paint because the paint stroke was that pointed. -.-;

Every reply on this post is delightful

sorry this is not relevant at all but ive seen this post many times and EVERY SINGLE TIME “ stop sending me asks about my supposedly gorilla sized hands, you bastards, you rotten bastards scared of the hands your minds gave me” makes me spiral ive never laughed so hard thank you

This entire thread is wonderful. What better reason to create art than pure human curiosity? 🥰

UM GUYS. I JUST NOTICED A CRAZY ISSUE W THE TUMBLR UPDATE.

YOU CAN SEE THE ICONS OF ANONS SOMETIMES.

The way I was able to recognize several anons in one of my inboxes bc of this error. Oh my god. Guys. This isn’t supposed to happen.

Weighing in to say:

YES, I SEE THIS ON MOBILE. HOWEVER I DO **NOT** THINK IT'S SHOWING THE ANON'S REAL IDENTITY.

The profile pictures I see next to anon asks are profile pictures that belong to other, non-anon asks in my ask box also. Some info

I think the bug is the inbox INCORRECTLY attributing anons to neighboring, logged-in asks.

Which is still a bad bug! Considering it makes it look like a long-time follower of mine sent me a spam ask.

And is worse if, say, one of these was anon hate.

But it's NOT the anon's real identity. It's a neighboring ask asker's identity

So if you have anon hate in your inbox that looks like it's attributed to your dear friend, who sends you lovely asks all the time, it was Not them.

CONFIRMED THE BUG IS INCORRECT ATTRIBUTION.

Thanks @thepatchycat for being a test subject. As you can see the icon being attributed to this ask is NOT the patchy cat

The pictured icon belongs to @watchingforcomets who sent me a nice ask about nail polish yesterday which I have not yet answered!

Twenty years ago, February 15th, 2004, I got married for the first time.

It was twenty years earlier than I ever expected to.

To celebrate/comemorate the date, I'm sitting down to write out everything I remember as I remember it. No checking all the pictures I took or all the times I've written about this before. I'm not going to turn to my husband (of twenty years, how the f'ing hell) to remember a detail for me.

This is not a 100% accurate recounting of that first wild weekend in San Francisco. But it -is- a 100% accurate recounting of how I remember it today, twenty years after the fact.

Join me below, if you would.

you want to read this