And stories shall become legends.

Sketchbook - Moss Kittens 2022

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I’m on Patreon, I have an Etsy shop and I sell Prints!

“There are no female aliens in our game because we don’t know how to make a female version of this alien” You know that alien you just designed? That male alien? Give it a female voice actor and have characters refer to it as she. That’s it. That’s literally all you have to do 

Make her shorter if you must

Make her BIGGER if you aren’t a coward 

Take your male alien bodytype, make her like 4 feet taller, give her an extra set of arms and sharper teeth, and as muscular as shit.

Boom.

Give her natural camouflage and make the man like this

Make them exactly the same size and shape but different colors

Give him a huge flock of babies following him around to show off what a great lay he is

Surprise mPreganté

Exactly the same but one of them has a cool hat (you decide which)

Give her a sensible haircut for successful hunting while he has a big dumb mullet so big and dumb the food can see him coming and book it

Please just for the love of pie do not begin and end with boobs

tumblr users aged 25-35 when you bring up bucky barnes:

earlier this week Twitter user ppuccin0 tweeted about a fashion article that advised against tops with large floral patterns, saying the wearer was in danger of looking like a "ロマンティックおばさん," or a "romantic auntie." the tweet went viral with many agreeing that a "romantic auntie" sounded like a very nice thing to aspire to be, and some even posted illustrations or photos tagged with the trend

illustration by Toyota Yuu (author of Cherry Magic)

illustration by 141shkw/Sora Midori (author of Beautiful Curse)

photos by Takinami Yukari (author of Motokare Mania and Watashi-tachi wa Mutsuu Ren'ai ga Shitai or "We Want A Painless Romance")

illustration by m:m (mangaka of Matataki no End Roll)

illustration by ooinuai (mangaka of Onikui Kitan)

illustration by ma2 (mangaka of The Reason We Fall In Love)

BONUS:

Twitter user WomeGa55 drew some art of “Romance Auntie x Combat Auntie”

IT GOT BETTER

a view of the pearl cove by kevin sloan, 2020

fun fact about languages: a linguist who was studying aboriginal languages of Australia finally managed to track down a native speaker of the Mbabaram language in the 60s for his research. they talked a bit and he started by asking for the Mbabaram word for basic nouns. They went back and forth before he asked for the word for “dog” The man replied “dog” They had a bit of a “who’s on first” moment before realizing that, by complete coincidence,  Mbabaram and English both have the exact same word for dog.

on a similar note, a traditional Ojibwe greeting is “Nanaboozhoo” so when the French first landed in southern Canada they thought that they were saying “Bonjour!” Which is fucking wild to think about. Imagine crossing the ocean and the first people you meet in months somehow speak French. 

Given that we famously don’t know the origin of the English word “dog”, I have decided to adopt an utterly batshit folk etymology conspiracy theory. As a treat.

For a while I just assumed that the English “potluck”, was derived from Chinook Jargon “potlatch”. Both describe comparable practices of guests contributing resources to a larger community-wide feast. But a little digging quickly reveals no etymological relation; instead of one, I got TWO! interesting linguistic insights into distinct cultures.

Here’s some more!

‘Ciao’ is from what now.

Per Wiktionary—

Okay then!

Straume (Flow) 2024, dir. Gints Zilbalodis

This deserved both the Globe and Oscar.

girl help they're putting "modern people under capitalism work more than medieval peasants" posts on my dash again

your rented hovel:

medieval peasant's owned hovel:

somebody who is got at the economy please help me my family has rickets

How much of your time is spent spinning thread? Sewing and repairing clothes? How often are you pregnant? How long does it take you to prepare a meal? How many of your babies have you watched die before age five?

Outside of “medieval obligations to Lord” you have to actually…work for your own survival. Like oh great, only 55% of your time goes to fattening up your Lord! Now winter is here and you have zero food in your stores because you gave it away to your Lord but at least you got a nice two month vacation!

And the number of girls/women who buy into this is hilarious. Oh baby no, that 200 day thing doesn’t apply to you. You have to work from sunup to sundown, 365 days a year, or the entire household falls apart. Rise before everyone else to get the fire and breakfast started, break your back lugging water and heating it and scrubbing laundry over and over and over again.

My great grandmother lived her entire life in a rural Ukrainian homestead with zero running water, heat, or plumbing. There is NO such thing as free time. If you are not actively farming or feeding animals or cooking/cleaning, you are sewing or mending or weaving or canning or salting to prepare for winter. And it had absolutely nothing to do with the structure of the government either; she did all of this through an empire, a soviet dictatorship, and eventually a democratic capitalist nation. Turns out, when you have no nearby stores or infrastructure, it doesn’t matter a damn if you live under communism or feudalism or capitalism. Someone’s gotta do the cooking and washing and mending and it’s probably gonna be you.

Look, I have men in the family with goodwill and chainsaws and carts that connect to cars and circular saws ... and still,heating up a room and cooking on a firestove is still So Much Hassle and So Much Hard Work just carrying the Shitton of Wood it takes to just cook a lunch.

Go and keep yourself warm and fed in a house with a wood stove and a solid fuel boiler for a weekend and then come and tell me how much easier life was before the invention of powered saws.

All these modern things are great yeah none of this is actually engaging with the criticism that bringing up medieval working hours is meant to point to, other than the "hours worked for lord bit" which is frankly just talking out of one's ass. The statistics for working hours comparison do try to account for hours working for subsistence, making clothes, etc.

The point of this criticism is not that medieval peasants had it so much better than us and we should go back to that exactly. The point is there are real ways in which we are less free and more exploited than fucking medieval pesants. The point is that we're supposed to be living in some kind of futuristic society were machines and computers do tons of the work and instead of that letting us rest more or spend more time doing things we care about, it's all being used to force the average persons face to the grindstone to work god awful, Victorian sweatshop fucking hours. The point is that modern technology is not inherently freeing, that just because you shit in a toilet instead of a hole, that doesn't mean your life is better in ways that are important and we should be pissed off about.

I'm a medievalist. You're a dipshit.

There are no ways where we are "less free and more exploited than fucking medieval peasants." None. We have not been forced to maintain subsistence pescatarian diets as a class or status divider from our meat-eating overlords, nor have we been beheaded and used as grave goods.

We do not undergo torture and facial mutilation for minor property crimes.

We do not all live in obligate high carbon monoxide environments that are so toxic from wood smoke that they decrease lung capacity within days.

Jewish people are no longer the direct property of the Crown.

Any quibbling about the exact numbers of the lord/personal workday misses the fucking point, which is that subsistence agricultural labor is backbreaking 12-14 hour workdays during the warm seasons and starvation during the cold, and the slightest fuckup in subsistence productivity - such as needing to dedicate more hours working the lord's fields - could kill. The yield of medieval livestock and farmland was greatly truncated compared to today, the grain-based medieval European diet was so abnormally high in fiber that it caused chronic diarrhea, and none of the annals from the sixth to the eleventh century mention more than one year of "great bounty."

Women do objectively have more rights nowadays than the average peasant of the Middle Ages and to act like this is not the case is so stupid that it's not even worth entertaining. Hey, did you know that one of the theories for the start of the Viking Age is that there was so much female infanticide among the elite that aristocratic young men had to raid in then-untouched areas to acquire enough of a bride-price to pay for the increasingly scarce resource that was wives?

And I'm not a Victorianist, but it is easy to find evidence that the typical Victorian sweatshop workday length was 9-16 hours and included the labor of children as young as four. It's almost like the 8 hour day was the culmination of decades of protest and campaigning, or something

And ah, the bucket. Have you heard of this thing called cholera? Dysentery? Norovirus? Typhus? Did you know that access to toilets is a key concern of every developing country? Lack of toilets is a major public health issue and poor sanitation kills 1.4 million people a year.

If you truly think that modern technology isn't freeing, then maybe the problem is that you don't see things like washing machines or space heaters or IV saline or synthetic insulin as technological innovations.

You are 30. At this age, you are choosing to be ignorant. Maybe work on that and don't do this stupid, fascist-friendly nostalgia wishcasting. You can point out that aspects of modern life are bad and advocate for change without cheapening your argument by insisting they're the Exact Same as being a peasant in 1092. If you are having problems with time management or depression, perhaps see a mental health professional instead of wallowing fruitlessly in the idea that you are a serf. You're not. I can tell you're not, because you're not riddled with parasites

Okay I'm sorry I'm responding directly: "if you are having problems with time management or depression, perhaps see a mental health professional instead of wallowing fruitlessly in the idea that you are a serf" is a fucking crazy way to end this post. "Have you tried having individual responsibility?" Ma'am, this is a critique of capitalism.

I'm saying this as a person who has been in treatment for bipolar 2 that presents mostly as severe and occasionally psychotic depression for 20 years.

If this person thinks that they have it worse than a medieval peasant, and screams at people who says that they do not have it worse than a medieval peasant, despite a mountain of evidence that they do not have it worse than a medieval peasant - that's a problem unrelated to capitalism. If OP is having trouble maintaining a 40/hr week to the point where it's upsetting, there are options for that, and those options don't include being in denial about premodern economic exploitation. That's really not a critique of capitalism. That's them admitting that they're having difficulty dealing with everyday life. Which is fine, many people do, but that's not the inevitable result of living in the modern world.

And yes, you do have to take some personal responsibility when dealing with your own mental health. Any mental health provider will tell you that - if you're not willing to put the work in, you will never get better. That includes not solely ingesting toxic nihilist misinformation that confirms your priors. I am not interested in babying people who want to wallow because they've decided that their politics means their depressive thought patterns are normal. That is not just insulting to me as a person who has been struggling for years to manage their depression, that is deeply deeply dangerous to both them and to other vulnerable people witnessing it, because it insists that severe depression is the natural result of holding the Correct politics that make you painfully aware of the world. No!!! It's not!!! You can be completely aware and attuned of how the modern world is structurally fucked up and still be energetic or in a good mood 90% of the time. I know this, because my friends who do not have diagnosed depression issues are capable of this, and some of them are deeply involved with the Socialist Party. In fact, it's them not being bogged down by depression that lets them be so active in leftist politics.

This framework also insists that there is no cure to your severe depression other than ending capitalism, which is an impossible goal. If you are told all the time by your online peer group, which is your main source of social interaction, that the only cure for your depression is impossible, where do you go? Because for a lot of people, for people I have known, it's off the side of the bridge.

A real critique of capitalism would, I don't know, talk about how the global seafood supply chain is so riddled with slavery that it's impossible to not support slavery when buying shrimp. "I feel pressured by my job and exhausted after my workweek during a period of insane governmental crisis that I haven't lived through before" is a reasonable problem, but it's one with multiple solutions - none of which are "ending capitalism."

And I'm sorry as a person who has spent twenty fucking years wrestling with the black dog the best therapist I've ever had was the gorilla who would say "That sounds like it's a fucking stupid waste of time. Try not to do that anymore" whenever I identified my awful coping mechanisms. Online doomerist self-harm masquerading as wise leftist praxis is a fucking stupid waste of time. Don't do that anymore.

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

iris by goo goo dolls really is insane though. I'd give up forever to touch you? you're the closest to heaven I'll ever be? all I can breathe is your life? and I don't want the world to see me cause I don't think they'd understand? when everything's meant to be broken I just want you to know who I am? does anyone hear me.

me, every single time i see people (especially women) talking about the divine feminine energy, or the sacredness of the womb or whatever it is now:

[image description: a two-panel photo of a person dialling a number and then placing the phone to their ear. the contact is saved as ‘Ursula K. Le Guin’ /end ID]

context is this quote by her:

one of my fave posts honestly

this is legitimately even funnier when you're an anthropologist because anthropologists would constitutionally not be able to answer this

atla just so happened to write one of the most insane and complex brother sister relationships in all of television, and yet for some reason everyone focused on zuko and azula instead, even though they are basically just normal siblings, and as such not even that interesting ..

their dynamic is more fraught and tragic than you could ever comprehend……

this☝️ is just a typical sibling interaction

the worst part of "you'll understand when you're older" is that you really do understand when you're older

The second worst part is, once you get older, you find yourself saying "you'll understand when you're older" with Full Comprehension of how fucking annoying you're being right now, but also knowing that it's all you can say.

It's worth noting that there are some extraordinary people in the world who have been quietly doing the work for decades, and they should be celebrated with all the fervor that we denounce the villains. I first read about Harrison twenty-odd years ago, when he'd already been doing this for about fifty years, and this is one of those guys whose life can, indeed, be summed up by his headline.

James Harrison saved millions of lives. Millions. Not with anything flashy or dramatic, not with profound speeches or brilliant strategy or any of the things we insist are the ways to impact the world. He simply kept himself as healthy as possible so that every few weeks he could go and sit quietly in a room and give away a fundamental part of himself — quite literally his lifeblood — to people he'd never meet, for no pay and no expectation of acknowledgement. (He was, it should be said, acknowledged quite a lot per this article, but that's beside the point.)

When we talk about the kind of people we want to elevate and celebrate in our societies, I often think of people like James Harrison. I hope we get more of him; not just for his blood, but for his heart.