Pinned
Reblogged netherworldpost
Is it Halloween yet?
Reblogged senadimell
here is a concept: time travel cop, fish & wildlife division
most of their job is dealing with the kinds of assholes who think black market tiger cubs are a great idea right up until someone gets mauled, except these are even bigger assholes with black market Smilodon cubs that they are even less equipped to care for
this is the most straightforward and therefore relatively headache-free part of their job, because it’s the same “put that thing back where it came from or so help me” song and dance every time
it’s also significantly less depressing than the trophy hunters who don’t even want an alive extinct animal. those are extra annoying because you have to undo the time travel that let them kill that poor Megatherium or thylacine or anklyosaur or whatever, and it’s always so much extra paperwork.
and those people suck, definitely, and have fully earned a stint in Time Jail. no question. but they still do not create anywhere near as much work as the obsessive hobbyists with their exhaustively careful best practices and worryingly good track-covering. also, weirdly, it’s almost always birds with them?
like. the guys who will flagrantly abuse Time Law to bird-nap breeding pairs just long enough to raise one clutch of eggs apiece, and return them seamlessly to their spots on the timeline. who are so determined to keep their pet (ha) projects going that no one even realizes what they’re doing until they have an entire stable breeding population of passenger pigeons up and running. who are now the reason that reps from six different zoos are about to start throwing hands right in front of you over who gets dibs.
those guys cause the most paperwork. and half the time they’re snapped up by the same zoo or wildlife preserve that gets their colony of ivory-billed woodpeckers or Carolina parakeets or — once, very memorably — giant fucking South Island moa, and they never even spend a day in Time Jail.
Ooh! There have been a few "surprise, not extinct!" events recently, again weirdly almost always birds, though occasionally fish. What if they really did go extinct, but someone from 2459 went back to 1900, built up a minimum breeding population in 2459, and then released them into the wild in 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015? Releasing new groups every five years in our century would avoid a sudden suspicious population surge and no one would think to look for the culprit in their own century because Jerdon’s Babbler (real-world example, rediscovered in 2014) has always been there/then.
You could build a novel around the relationship between the time cop and the rogue bird lover. The time cop caught the bird lover over the passenger pigeons. They went to time jail for 10 years outside the timeline, and then were hired to manage the passenger pigeons by an accredited zoo's. The time cop suspects they're still up to something, but other than the passenger pigeons, all they appear to be doing is raising research colonies of perfectly ordinary birds. Except all the species they're working with were believed to be extinct at one point....
One thing real world zoos do now is...well...something like elven changelings if you think about it. They time the mating of a captive breeding pair to that of an isolated wild breeding pair in places where inbreeding is a serious risk. Then they swap a captive-born offspring for a wild-born--each breeding pair unknowingly raising a foster. Both zoos and the wild population get improved genetic diversity, without the risk inherent in "rewilding" a zoo-born adult. Doing that with birds and time travel would be even easier--grab an egg, take it to the future, raise and breed it, take an egg back to the original nest. The original parents raise their grandchild, not their child.
The hardest part for me would be explaining why the time cop thought this was wrong!
oh I love all of this. i think the time cop would eventually just be like “PLEASE get a license from an accredited zoo already so i can stop having to deal with you” but the accredited zoos aren’t on board with the “release into the wild 200 years ago” part of the scheme
and also our rogue bird enthusiast has a white whale and that white whale is Haast’s eagle
Reblogged kayuripax
me re-scrolling thru older convos w/ my friends becuase i remember how much i enjoyed talking to them about the subject
Reblogged ofstormsandfire
*Writing. Not necessarily posting/sharing if that came later.
Reblogged fairandfatalasfair
thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes
reasons for this:
- basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
- like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
- here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
- TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
- Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
- all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that
- I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
- But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
- In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
- On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
- like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not
An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.
please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them
legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes
- Willing Suspension of Disbelief
- Watsonian vs. Doylist
- Trope Tropes, for all the ways tropes are used, deconstructed, subverted, and played with.
- The Oldest Ones in the Book, which is basically my favorite thing on the entire Internet
- Punk Punk, for -punk subgenres
- Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness, Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism
- The Weird Al Effect is a fun one
- Chekhov’s Gun, Chekhov’s Boomerang, Chekhov’s Skill, and further variations
- Law of Conservation of Detail
- Law of Conservation of Normality
- Anthropic Principle
- Word of God, Death of the Author
- Sliding Scale of Fourth Wall Hardness
- Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness
- Genre Savvy
- Flashbacks and Chronology breaks down all the ways you can handle chronology in storytelling
- Show, Don’t Tell is a very good breakdown of what is showing, what is telling, and how both can be used effectively.
- Lampshade Hanging
- Noodle Incident is just fun imo
- Genre Title Grab Bag
- Fridge Horror
- Rule of Cool, and also Cool of Rule
- The Smurfette Principle
- The Hays Code - not a trope but a very good breakdown of how the Hays Code affected storytelling in film
this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful
Informed Attribute is one of the ones I reference most often as an editor.
Theory of Narrative Causality is one of my personal favorites, because it's kind of fun when a story acknowledges that things are happening in the story because that's what makes it a good story.
Also Applied Phlebotinum, because sometimes you don't need to know how something works, it just does, and that's all that matters for the purposes of the narrative.
Reblogged kayuripax
Been a really long time since I've watched Daredevil but I do remember coming away from it feeling like it presented a pretty compelling internally-consistent moral justification for the vigilante thing. You're not planet-crackingly powerful, it's just that you can hear, in detail, every awful thing your neighbors are doing to each other, every night that they're doing it. You can't not know and you can't pretend not to know and when the kid tells you the next day that he just fell down the stairs you can't fall back on the provided ambiguity to absolve yourself of your responsibility to act. Semi-relatedly, you're really really good at martial arts. Start the clock
Reblogged illusion-of-death
i simply need everyone to understand that i am tired all of the time. literally at all moments. if i ever go somewhere and do something, it is not because i am somehow full of energy, but instead that i have carefully stored up all of my little bits of energy like a dragon collecting jewels, and am now vaporizing them all at once
Reblogged sanctuaryforalluniverses
do you ever have such a monumentally bad brain day that you just take away its mic?
like...... buddy, you are producing insanely bad thoughts today and believing them, I'll take it from here, get off the stage
I don't know if this is asked in earnest or just a thought but since I'm waiting for my therapy session, here it goes
The method I worked out for myself is to pretend that there's this personal assistant (Barbara) to my brain. The thoughts and emotions are clients who either come to pitch an idea or to demand attention from the boss.
Most are important and relevant thoughts; but sometimes they come at the wrong time (if I wake up at night worrying about a task I just imagine Barbara in her pyjamas groggily telling the thoughts to come during office hours).
And some clients (mean thoughts, false beliefs, anxiety jabs) I just imagine as panicked or rude customers that need to be treated as such. You are not getting audience with the boss until you can state your purpose calmly and clearly. If you insist on being rude, I'll throw you out.
It helps you separate yourself from the thoughts and gives you time to evaluate if they need to be acted on. My therapist loves Barbara
Reblogged sanctuaryforalluniverses
Hey guys let me tell you about advance fee scams
I hope y'all are familiar with these in this day and age, especially my artists out there, because they're incredibly common.
About half an hour ago I posted a drawing and tagged it #artists on tumblr, and very quickly received this comment.
My scam radar went off immediately, due to the generic blog name and lack of any emotion in the comment, but I decided it might be an entertaining venture so I dmed them. They asked for a drawing "of these", and sent me a random selfie. I got the details and told them it would be $15, and they promptly offered me $300. At this point I know it's a scam, but I play along for funsies and give them my paypal. Shortly, they send me this image for "confirmation" (I blocked out my email)
And they began to insist that I checked my email. I looked in my spam folder and found the following email.
This is fake. This is not a thing. And the "you're to refund the $200.00 back" is the scam. They send vaguely official-looking emails at you to "prove" that they sent you the money, then have you send them $200 (or however much the scam is for). Then, surprise surprise, you're out $200.
I continued to play along for a bit, and in the second email "Paypal" told me that I had to refund the $200 before they could "credit the $300 to my account", along with these lovely threats.
And yeah, it's silly. But it's not silly if you don't know and get scammed. So. Spread, please! And thank you very much to @mlaurel for the opportunity to get these screenshots.
This is a variation on a much older scam that often results in the victim being out money and also out whatever they were selling. It goes something like this:
- victim posts an item for sale on craigslist or w/e
- scammer contacts asking if a check is ok
- scammer then asks if they can write a check for more than the agreed-upon price and for the seller to give them the overage back as cash, often with some excuse about it being an out-of-state bank, they don't have a card and need some cash for something else, or whatever.
- scammer gives check, gets cash and item, and bounces
- guess what the check does, too
ANY kind of structure where you supposedly get money but have to give some of it back to someone should twig your scam radar, frankly.
Reblogging because some people need to refresh their scam radar, or start building theirs. I see far too many people fall for traps, and don't dare say for a second "this will never happen to me" because all it takes is a momentary lapse in judgement.
Reblogged vaspider
Reblogged sanctuaryforalluniverses
Hey, if you do crafts (especially things like crochet, knitting, embroidery, etc), make sure to look up how to identify when a listing is AI generated. You do NOT want to waste money on an incredible looking kit or pattern that is physically impossible to make, especially if you're on sites like etsy hoping to support an actual artist.
OP's tags:
#as an embroiderer: big red flags are curved straight or satin stitches #stitches that you cannot identify or figure out at all #thread that fades into other colors #backgrounds that match the piece weirdly well (like a floral embroidery piece with a matching vase and flowers on the table) #and a lack of videos of the piece and photos from other angles
Here's a guide for identifying real freaking cross-stitch patterns that are doable, and not AI-converted confetti:
A guide for crochet patterns:
And one for embroidery:
I don't knit, but I'm sure someone has a comparable guide somewhere. I know crochet and knitting seems like more of a problem- the crochet "patterns" make vastly different items than what's pictured, and you can find some of those on r/CraftedbyAI because some people do follow those "patterns" to make a point.
Cross-stitch and embroidery seem like they'd be easier to fake, right? Like, cross-stitch patterns are basically pixel art, so what's the harm?
The cross-stich often has dozens or hundreds of colours and they change every single pixel, which is basically impossible for a human to reproduce. It's just not a pattern, dammit.
The embroidered ones break my heart, though:
Wherein someone is making a lovely embroidered piece but they end up dissatisfied with their work because it doesn't look as impossibly plush and bright as the fake.
It makes people who are new to these crafts feel like they're not doing it right, or gives them insane expectations, and it can drive people away from the craft.
I know of several cross-stitch pattern shops on Etsy that have closed because it's just not worth the investment when they're competing with AI-generated nonsense that can charge pennies because it doesn't take any time or effort to make.
Fuck AI-generated patterns and crafts.
I'm actually knitting right now! Most of the resources I can find are targeted towards crochet because amigurumi and crocheting cute little creatures is super hot right now, but this information definitely applies to knit pieces as well.
Most (if not all) AI-generated images that feature knitted objects possess at least one of these traits:
-Rows (or even entire components of the project) splitting or merging in ways that make no sense. This sweater looks impressive until you try to make sense of that lump near the left shoulder or whatever is going on with the collar. You can even see one row splitting into two near the bottom for seemingly no reason at all.
-Impossible stitches. Those lumpy squares (?) in between Mario's eyes are not real stitches. Neither are the stitches that fade seamlessly into tufts of material on the lion's mane.
-Impossibly huge projects. This elephant is almost twice as tall as the person next to it, and you'll realize that the stitches are actually massive when you take the time to think about how you could make it yourself. If you look closely, you'll also see a fifth leg on the elephant!
-The overall "vibe" of the image is glossy, shiny, plastic-y, or smooth to a degree that is almost unnerving. Yarn comes in lots of different colors and textures, but what's depicted in the image below is a bit too vivid and perfect to be real. Excessive blurring/out-of-focus areas on the project itself can also be signs of AI use.
Apologies for the long addition, I just loathe this stuff with a passion. The only people who benefit from the proliferation of AI images in fiber artist's spaces are scammers, and they make things worse for literally everyone else.
Reblogged swords-n-spindles
I just want you all to know, that if and when this site does experience a real exodus and/or get sunsetted for good, even if we don't keep in touch I'll remember you so fondly. You're the online equivalent of the other kid on the beach where we built sandcastles together; the girl at the campsite where we explored the trees. You're the drunk person who shared kind words in the bathroom at the club, you're the talented artists at the life drawing class or the poetry night in a city where I don't live anymore. It makes me sad that maybe in the future our paths won't cross so easily, but even when we leave this little shared piece of cyberspace, carried away on our briefly intersecting trajectories, just know I still love you
Reblogged ivycrowned
#okay so I only counted books I know I ACTUALLY FINISHED#if we were counting ones I started and never finished the number would've been way higher#also saw many books in here that I own and have not gotten around to reading yet...#I got 64 that I know for a fact I've read. which is... less than I thought I'd get lmao#polls#of a sort
Reblogged peachdoxie
I think about Azula shooters often and their common refrain of "if Azula hadn't had a mental breakdown, she would've won" and I'm here to tell you that no, she wouldn't have.
There is no universe in which Azula was winning that fight with Zuko (or Katara, for that matter).
Azula spent so much of Book 2 being built up as this deadly terrifying force against whom the heroes are badly outmatched that it can be difficult to catch exactly how quickly Zuko is advancing.
Back up a bit to Book One. For the fearsome exiled crown prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko's not that impressive a firebender. He's not bad by any stretch, and he's able to lay the untrained Sokka and Katara flat pretty easily. Then he gets in the ring with Aang, who is an airbending master, and the difference between a regular bender and a master becomes apparent when Aang literally puts his ass to bed:
People have attributed this to the fact that no one's fought an airbender in 100 years, but I think it's also worth noting that Aang (a 12 year old from a pacifist nation) has probably never fought anyone before. Like, ever. And yet the second Aang thinks "okay, I'll attack back", the fight's over.
Zuko's got the same genetic predisposition for firebending talent that Azula does, yet it never seems to manifest because of his mental blocks. At the beginning of the series, he's already so beat down that all he really has is conviction, pride, and anger, so even with training from Iroh (the firebending master, thank you very much), he struggles. Yet throughout Book 2, when he has no time to train because he's on the run, he actually seems to advance faster. The fact that his bending is literally tied to his character arc (as his morals become tangled and he has to fight off aforementioned mental blocks) is pretty brilliant. Like, by the time of the Crossroads of Destiny, Zuko getting his ass handed to him by Aang is a pretty consistent feature of the show--he just can't match wits with him.
Hell, at the beginning of the series, he and Iroh (again: the actual firebending master) launch a combined power surface-to-air attack...which Aang casually swats away into a nearby ice wall. Come the Crossroads of Destiny, however, and Zuko by himself launches this bigass fireball that blows through Aang's defenses.
Zuko advances so quickly that it's scary. That prodigious talent is in him even if it doesn't come through as cleanly as with Azula. Who, by the way, was busy about to get flattened by Katara some few dozen feet away, until Zuko took over and then effectively stalemated her himself.
All of this in retrospect makes it abundantly clear why Zuko's firebending seemed to skyrocket so much when he learned true firebending from the Sun Warriors: it was really the only thing left. He's hard a hard road learning how to fight waterbenders, earthbenders, and airbenders, and even if unconsciously, he's applying the philosophy Iroh taught him about augmenting his bending style with aspects of other styles (see also, the waterbending-like fire whips he uses in the above gif). Once he actually understands fire and how it works, he's got it mastered. Hence why any gap between him and Azula effectively disappears as soon as their next fight--before her friends have betrayed her and her stability goes out the window. There's no real sense of urgency to their fight at the Boiling Rock prison. True, Sokka's presence with the sword helps, but Zuko doesn't look remotely worried and he counters Azula's every attack perfectly.
All her life, Azula only ever learned fire. She was taught by the best people the fire nation can employ, so she knows all the cool tricks, but she's still poisoned by the corrupted firebending practiced in the modern ATLA timeline. Unlike Zuko, who managed to get the basics if nothing else from Iroh (fire comes from the breath, and can be used to survive as much as to kill), Azula has always used fire as a weapon and a means to hurt others. She has no true knowledge of the craft, meaning she's got the same weaknesses as Zhao, she's just better disciplined to the point she can make up for it.
Zuko's victory was a given considering Azula's complete loss of control by the time of Sozin's comet, but even had she been in a perfect mental state, she'd have lost, because in many ways Zuko is simply the better firebender.
And that's the truth of it.
Reblogged sanctuaryforalluniverses
There's an EU initiative going on right now that essentially boils down to wanting to force videogame publishers with paid games and/or games with paid elements such as DLC, expansions and microtransactions to leave said games in a playable state after they end support, or in simpler terms, make them stop killing games.
A "playable state" would be something like an offline mode for previously always online titles, or the ability for people to host their own servers where reasonably possible just to name some examples.
I don't think I need to tell anyone that having something you paid for being taken from you is bad, which is a thing that routinely happens with live service and other always online games with a notable recent example being The Crew which is now permanently unplayable.
Any EU citizen is eligible to sign the initiative, but only once and if you mess up that's it. You can find it here. (https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en)
Even if you're not European or you signed it already, you can share this initiative with anyone who is, even if they don't care about videogames specifically because this needs a million signatures and there is different thresholds that need to be met for each EU country for their votes to even count and could also be a precedent for other similar practices like when Sony removed a bunch of Discovery TV content people paid for.
SUPPORT BELOW 50% OF THE THRESHOLD IN THESE COUNTRIES:
Bulgaria - 35% Croatia - 45% Cyprus - 12% (!!!!) Czechia - 47% Greece - 27% Italy - 41% Latvia - 43% Luxembourg - 20% Malta - 11% (!!!!) Romania - 48% Slovakia - 47% Slovenia - 38%
SEVEN countries out of 27 have met the threshold so far. Deadline is 31st July, 2025.
Reblogged fairandfatalasfair
What alternatives to the fandom ecosystem of Tumblr might there be? Are there any spaces where this kind of chaotic internet still exists? And how do we find or become a part of those spaces? Ik Tumblr doesn't really have any equivalents but it's the fandoms and niche communities I'm most scared of losing
the fediverse!
THE FEDIVERSE!
THE FEDIVERSE!
THE FEDIVERSE!
THE FEDIVERSE!
THE FEDIVERSE!!!
You have several tumblr-adjacent servers you can create your account at. And the best of all, all them talk to each other and you can follow people in every one of them, even in those different from the one you are in!
Reblogged whengreenfindsred
*steps one degree of separation outside my normal tumblr orbit* oh wow you people are all out of your minds