Pinned
More Our Flag Means Death bracelets! This time Lucius Spriggs, Mermaid Stede, Buttons, Calypso, and Spanish Jackie!
If you’re on Twitter you can follow my shop account @llbeadbazaar ! I might make a shop Tumblr too, we’ll see. Otherwise the shop itself will open on 5/1 and you can find it at https://ko-fi.com/llbeadbazaar
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Underwater forest with tadpoles, Vancouver Island, BC, Canada
photograph by Eiko Jones
Can’t risk it
The duck of creativity. I waited so long for it.
In terms of science communication and space exploration advocacy, Elon Musk has sent us back into the fucking Stone Age.
It’s hard enough to encourage the public to see the value in space exploration, especially when the problems facing society right now are so intense that space exploration seems frivolous and needlessly expensive by comparison (keyword “seems”) but now that this clown is the face of the future of space, it’s doubling, hell, tripling down on the idea that space exploration is a fantasy for bored billionaires that would rather fuck off to mars and escape the problems of earthly society (problems that they had a starring role in creating) rather than spend a penny of their wealth to help remedy them. Tale as old as time for a science communicator. Heard it a million times. But now it’s so much harder to get people to understand the other side of the coin because the nightmare scenario is already here and his name is elongated muskrat
To add a little bit of context as to what that value actually is… The thing I hear the most in this conversation is “we need to take care of this planet before we start thinking about other ones.” Yes, I agree. The well-being of our planet and it’s people should be out top priority. But we can’t properly take care of our planet if we don’t fully understand it.
The Earth does not exist in a bubble. It’s part of a dynamic and ever-evolving solar system, and galaxy and universe. He have to look at the earth in that context to be able to know and care for it. To care for a planet, we have to know how planets work. When doctors treat patients they look at the medical record, they look at family history, they look at symptoms and compare them to known diseases to find a diagnosis.
How did the earth form? What was it like in the past? Why did it change? That’s the medical record.
We’ve got the earths siblings in the neighborhood. Why is Mars a frozen desert? Why is Venus a molten hell scape? Could those things happen here? That’s the family history.
What kinds of things are floating around our neighborhood? Could they affect us? All this is necessary to diagnose the Earths problem, to anticipate the direction it’s going, and to help it heal.
And the minute we get an asteroid scare, that’s when folks start asking why we weren’t looking up 🙄
As a science communicator at a well known establishment, 10000x this. We have a student program that talk about Earth systems and how missions like Landsat were so useful to understand our own planet better FROM SPACE. I could go on and on but just, like, reread OP's thoughts, they're perfect.
Yellow-breasted or Indochinese Green Magpie (Cissa hypoleuca), BATH TIME!!!, family Corvidae, order Passeriformes, Viet Nam
photographs by Leo Ngo
SHOP HERE 🎉🧡💜
Shop has been updated with a whole bunch of new stuff as well as some merchs are back in stock again. Shop will be open until the last week of April where I will be closing it in May for my first boothing event of the year.
Highly recommend international peeps to get any of the stuff ur eyeing now as I can’t promise leftover stocks after May 😉
I unfortunately will not be able to ship to EU countries due to the new shipping acts.
Any reshares are much appreciated! 🥹🫶
Not sure about anyone else but I re-read all my favourite AO3 comments when I’ve had a rough day so if you’ve ever taken the time to write a deep, funny, or just kind comment, thank-you.
item: safety pin wings
total cost: ~$4
time: <1 hr
more people need to give themselves permission to write and draw pornography
it is virtuous and necessary that you write, draw, and distribute pornography
can we start with not conflating "erotic/sexual art or writing" with pornography
no lmao
@thoughtscout "Erotica" was first coined by people wanting to get around censorship laws that would ban pornography under the legal classification of Obscenity, but would not ban romance novels, or Literature, as that was "of artistic worth" and therefore protected speech. Here is the USA Legal definition, pulled from Wikipedia, of "Obscenity":
United States obscenity law deals with the regulation or suppression of what is considered obscenity and therefore not protected speech or expression under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In the United States, discussion of obscenity typically relates to defining what pornography is obscene.
It's important to understand that key idea, that "obscene" is a legal classification that marks something as not protected by Freedom of Speech, The Press, and Free Expression, which is the First Amendment.
There are several ethical problems with having a way to exempt something from protection, and therefore censor it. It encourages people who want to censor things to try and get them legally classed as exceptions to any Freedom of Speech laws on the books. Now, with art, there are exemptions that should exist--art that harms people in the making of it, for example, which is what Child Sexual Abuse Material is, and why we call it that. We also classify filmed evidence of murder done for the film's sake as an exception. But the way people define the word "obscenity" is extremely different depending on who you ask, and because definitions in this country are set by precedent, i.e. judges ruling on court cases, the definition of things like "obscenity" keeps changing.
In 1873, for example, the Comstock Act said that birth-control information and condoms were "obscene" and banned sending them through the mail, which meant a lot of people were cut off from being able to learn about birth control (because nobody was learning about it in school--most people at the time didn't go to school after learning basic reading skills, if that; children worked, just like their adult relatives, to support their families). Do you think a book like this one that educates about puberty and sex, including birth-control, is obscene and pornography? Well it was, at one time, and BANNED. And I don't tell you this so you can go, "Well people were backwards then, we're Enlightened now, we'd only ban the RIGHT things" People have always been people, just as wise AND just as foolish as we are now, and progress has never been a straight line.
Our point is that pornography is an important thing to make, and to fight for, and to CALL "pornography". It's important to hold the line and not let people begin to call WRITTEN and DRAWN things the same as PHOTOGRAPHED and FILMED things. For MANY DECADES, people have been trying to ban and censor pornography that has involved no one but the author or artist in the making, and is therefore HARMING no actual human beings. A photograph involves real, live, breathing human beings; a drawing involves a piece of paper and a pen and the artist.
Whatever you think is "just erotica" or even "not erotica at all" is going to be called porn and obscene by a malicious and controlling person like say Warriors For Innocence, who successfully scared LiveJournal into banning a whole lot of writing and drawing and also queer and survivor support communities and users in 2006. These same folks are behind the Purity/Anti culture on Tumblr, and members successfully lobbied to pass FOSTA-SESTA and the subsequent "Titty Ban" on any website that relies on an app. FOSTA-SESTA, btw, has made human trafficking and harm to sex workers WORSE, not better.
So you need to start fighting WITH pornographers who are fighting censorship, because the people you think are on your side about only banning and censoring "the REAL bad stuff" are going to turn around and call YOUR stuff just as bad. They're already calling queer people obscene just for existing. They are calling us child abusers again, just for breathing. I don't think you want to be on the side of that rhetoric, because it will come for you and call YOU obscene and worthy of arrest, in the end.
It is not enough to get into a comfy sleeping position- one must go through several and spin like a rotisserie chicken to arrive at the position you started with.
People with low spoons, someone just recommended this cookbook to me, so I thought I’d pass it on.
I always look at cookbooks for people who have no energy/time to do elaborate meal preparations, and roll my eyes. Like, you want me to stay on my feet for long enough to prepare 15 different ingredients from scratch, and use 5 different pots and pans, when I have chronic fatigue and no dishwasher?
These people seem to get it, though. It’s very simple in places. It’s basically the cookbook for people who think, ‘I’m really bored of those same five low-spoons meals I eat, but I can’t think of anything else to cook that won’t exhaust me’. And it’s free!
SPREAD THE WORD THIS IS FUCKING GOD TIER OH MY GOD, SOMETIMES I HAVE SPOONS SOMETIMES I DON’T BUT NO COOKBOOK OFFERS LEVELS IN THEIR RECIPES THIS ONE DOES!
