i love heavensward: a series of bulletin points

actually……1 more thing because I realised I haven’t posted this yet. the best & worst piece of art I’ve ever made - 3D shark called biscuit that I modelled for a class a few years ago. toiled on him for hours, cried over him, went on a journey with him. still failed the class. he haunts me to this day

LMFAO hell yeah give biscuit 2000 notes. why the fuck not. are you seeing this professor? are you seeing what my “failed” experiment has achieved

i want to turn off reblogs for this post but it’d feel like taking biscuit out back and shooting him in the head. so instead i just hover my cursor over the button like i’m gently tensing my finger against the trigger of my 4 gauge shotgun while biscuit is staring at me with his soulful lack of eyes

It took me forever to work on in short bursts while still injured, but sometimes and idea just sinks its teeth into you and won't let go. 🦁

I have thoughts about the last part:

This is what mass consumerist art has done to the idea of selling that as a product when it's so clearly fine art. Like, with the effort she's putting in x20 for a decent wage and materials?? That's a $80,000 piece of art a member of the landed gentry would commission a year in advance for his wife on their 20th wedding anniversary. This is a priceless heirloom. How can you say "Oh yeah, I wanna buy it, you should sell them" as if you could ever turn something like this into a product??

This is fine art, period. That piece will be in a museum, or if not is should be in a museum in a hundred years.

I just said to my wife, "oh, look at this beautiful autistic person, this is autistic culture," when I sent her the link. And half a second later I said, "and I think she has the same headphones we do."

But truly, this is incredible fine art. Fuck. I love that little moth.

Holy shit YES this nails something I have been trying to put words to for ages.

One of my friends was a great lacemaker, he made a 6ft by 6ft buckspoint veil for his wife for their wedding, sprigged all over with meaningful flowers and fruits and stuff (Things like her favourite flower, but also representations of both his and her mother's wedding bouquets, the blossom trees from an orchard they went to on a memorable date, hydrangeas from her grandparents' garden, sweet peas which grew wild around their first house together... Something 180 sprigs in all, some of them just little things the size of a postage stamp but lots of them bigger than A4-size, just a truly nightmarish amount of work) - And people often asked "Can I buy one like it? How do I get one of those?" And her answer was always "Marry a lacemaker, and have a five year engagement while he makes it."

Because this is absolutely money-can't-buy it work... Unless you are someone's patron. Like, fully "I have contracted this artisan to work for me, I am paying all of their expenses for as long as it takes to make this, because it is both mentally and physically taxing work that will take them months or years of work, and I will keep paying them for months and years after it is done because they will have committed so much time to me and shaped their style so much in tandem with my needs that they now are exponentially more valuable to me than to anyone else" With an extra portion of "I may have just burnt all my money because if they die with it unfinished nobody else will complete this for me."

But that exact idea of, you CAN pay for this, but you aren't buying a product, you are commissioning a work which will both be the life's work of the creator (at least, for the period that they are making it) and that will potentially change the face of the craft forever beyond it. (SOMEONE commissioned the Lindisfarne Gospel, someone commissioned the Mona Lisa.) ...Feels important.

Commissioned work deserves its pay; mass-production by its nature cannot be commissioned and cannot achieve the same results. I.e. you pay what its worth. You can't demand Art and expect to pay cheap

if you have OCD that moralistic post it not about you. keep scrolling. i love you

yeah even the one that gave you that sinking terror and has you planning your penance behavior and going through your whole life trying to identify when you did whatever it said about prejudice or abuse or whatever. it's not about you they don't know you and they certainly don't care about you

I got inspired by this post

- Dorothee Soelle, The Inward Road and the Way Back

Sleeping positions with Bento

One of the many perils of engaging with Internet Discourse is that sometimes you realize after the fact that the person you were responding to is a literal child who has mistaken their first big feeling about a wildly complex adult topic for an informed opinion, at which point you have to just stare wearily into the middle distance like: ah, yes, this is my cosmic punishment for having once also been fourteen and convinced I knew everything.

Like. I'm not saying teens shouldn't have access to these conversations or that they should be forced to identify themselves by age, because the negatives in both instances profoundly outweigh the positives. But I do think that, regardless of age, we should collectively start reintroducing a cultural respect for the idea that some people know more than you; that having feelings about something is not the same as understanding it; and that, while engaging in debate can be a good way to improve your grasp of a topic, this doesn't apply if your starting position is a baseline level of hostility towards anything that doesn't line up with the little you already think you know. There's no shame in being less knowledgeable about something than others - by definition, everyone starts out with Baby's First Opinion! - but you do need to understand that it is Baby's First Opinion. You have to want to learn, and you simply can't do that if you've mistaken knowing that a given issue exists for properly comprehending it.

A moonlit Jonmina commission for Athas 🌕

“u got snap?” i have an adress where u can send me flowers and love letters u mf act like a real grown man.

Gliding silently beneath the waves

Art Nouveau Horseshoe Crab vase by Stephanie Young

[Image Description: a photograph of a green and silver porcelain vase. Its sides are decorated with horseshoe crabs, and seaweed. End image description.]

Kanto Starter Pokemon Japanese Ukiyo-e Style Artwork made by Lanipuna

I genuinely believe that the new SW trilogy wouldn’t have flopped out into irrelevance like it did if they hadn’t dumped Finn on the side of the freeway like a new pet rabbit the week after easter

Anyway in my heart Finn became a Jedi alongside Rey and inspired a Stormtrooper insurrection and Kyle Ron went back to his mom like he should have day fucking one and that angry redhead dude blew up with the star destroyer and Poe got to make it happen and at the end Rey doesn’t give a shit who her bitch ass non-palpatine parents might have been because she gets her new family like she needed and palpatine stays dead at the bottom of his musty hole like he should have and Finn and Poe give each other approximately 130% the amount of lingering meaningful looks and then one of their run-together-to-reunite moments results in a heat-of-the-moment make out like it should have and Luke and Leia meet in person a minimum of once so she can sibling slap him at least once for being a useless dramatic old hermit for a billion years and tell him to get the Chanel boots back on and stop being a sad hobo and then for no reason at all there is an ewok style moon of Endor forest party at the end like God intended

Love that they put “a sense of impending doom” as one of the symptoms of a heart attack, like girl, that’s just how it is to be alive these days, you’re gonna have to be more specific

This made me chuckle but after scrolling away I felt the need to come back to it.

Because as someone who has felt this I can not stress how different it actually is from anxiety. Which is saying a lot because I have a massive anxiety disorder.

I’ve only felt this twice in my life - once when I was going into kidney failure due to an infection and again when my body was going into shock due to dehydration and malnourishment due to GI issues - and I can not stress how much it saved my life. It’s hard to even put it into words. It’s not like a panic attack, or anxiety. It is a horrific gut turning feeling of absolute dread.

Especially if you have anxiety you’ll know the difference honestly. It’s so much worse. It’s every cell in your body and your brain screaming that there’s something horribly wrong in a way you’ve never felt. It’s your brain screaming out that you are going to die in a way no panic attack has ever done before.

I can not stress how important it is to get yourself to the ER if you feel this way. Especially if your having other physical symptoms.

This is amazing and incredibly helpful, oh my god. Thank you.

Seconding the above : I was going into shock from internal bleeding, and that sense of “something is gravely wrong” was entirely different from my day-to-day whirlwind of anxiety.

For me, it was very quiet. For me, there was a deep sense that I could just lie down on the floor and not have to ever get up again, no effort required.

That combined wrongness/relief was so weird and so unsettling that I drove myself to the ER.

The “impending” part is really key to that symptom, I think, based on my experience. It’s not the existential dread of late-stage capitalism grinding the world into nurdles. It’s a ghost crow on your shoulder whispering “it’s here, it’s now.”

Impending doom is also a feature of anaphylaxis, something I’m intimately familiar with as someone with mast cell dysfunction.

For me, its the overwhelming, near calm certainty of doom that distinguishes it from the jittery panic of “but something could go wrong.”

There’s no “what if?” There’s no room to question it. It just IS. And it’s very different from the “calm” of disassociation too. I’m not disassociated from myself when it happens. I’m probably actually the most present ever.

I’ve turned to doctors and told them calmly and with utter certainty “I am going to die” and the reaction that calm certainty gets is immediate intervention because doctors also recognize that stillness as the body not bothering to waste any time on fight or flight and just going straight to “death is imminent due to some internal failing, act accordingly.”

When I was lying in bed recovering from a hit to the head, I remember a moment in the middle of the night where I went from a sorta half asleep state to being instantly wide awake and feeling, with absolutely certainty, that I was about to die. It was dead silent in my head other than that thought, screaming at me that Something Is Wrong, something is Terribly Wrong. It was like I could feel the dread seeping into my bones, my chest, like I could see it in the back of my eyes, sense it around the corner. Everything was going haywire, like a train was blowing its whistle and I was on the track and my body was trying to get me to Move Dammit.

I called emergency services and tried to explain what I’m feeling. I thought I would be written off, but when I started describing the feeling, immediately the dispatcher sent paramedics to my apartment. Good thing too, as I had a stroke in the ambulance.

Impending doom is real, and a defense mechanism created by the brain to get you to get medical help for something that you cannot handle by yourself, and as someone with panic disorders, it is wildly different and arguably even more terrifying than any attack I’ve ever had.

Oooh oooh! I had this when my kidneys gave out after having been backed up and infected for a couple years!!!!

It was this “Something is Wrong” feeling and it is very difficult to describe just how urgent and different it feels from the usual “Whelp, I’m going to die.” feeling anxiety has.

I got to the ER in time and they slapped antibiotics on me before even knowing what was wrong, and I felt better by the next morning but I was thisclose to dying.

I’m married to someone who deals with both severe anxiety as well as CPTSD. Might be a shot, but would anyone have a comparative description of the dread caused by ©PTSD and this?

I happened to see this post again by pure chance when a mutual reblogged it and I’m not sure I can adequately describe it but I can try my best.

I am someone with severe ©PTSD that predates my experiences of almost dying. Before knowing what the “impending doom” of dying actually felt like, the fear and anxiety caused by my ©PTSD felt very much like what you think death should feel like.

The danger feels so real, and it has driven me to the ER a couple of times because there was no way my body could feel this cold, this hot, this shaky, this fast, this full of dread, and for something to not be wrong.

And there was something wrong. My body was flooded with all kinds of stress hormones in response to trauma. It was my brain misfiring and insisting we had to run because there was a metaphorical tiger stalking me through the tall grass, and we needed to get away now, now, now.

I still experience episodes like this – largely due to the repeated trauma of almost dying several times, but while I know the danger feels real (and that there could be something else wrong with me, I do not dismiss that), I am now also in a unique position to know that this feeling is not what they mean when they talk about Impending Doom.

Even when I’ve been detached and disassociated from myself or had psychosis from medication interactions, part of me still knew on some level that I was panicking, and I was alive enough to panic.

Impending Doom is not like that.

There is no franticness to impending doom. No room for questions. It just is. It’s in every cell of your body; every piece of your brain resonates with it. There’s no anxiety. There’s no panic. There’s no fear. There’s no fight, flight, or freeze. You’re just certain.

I know it sounds trite to say it, but you will know because there is no way to mistake it for anything else.

You are going to die, it’s a fact, and you are eerily calm about it.

Like I don’t think words can ever fully express how still everything feels. How still you feel as a person. It’s like your body just shuts everything else off but in a very present and coherent way.

It’s like feeling the weight of the ocean bearing down on top of you and still somehow being able to think, “hm, this isn’t good. I should probably call an ambulance” in a way that I have never experienced from ©PTSD or anxiety.

And it freaks people out.

I had a doctor friend tell me once it’s a bit like the uncanny valley of calmness. No one should be able to look at you and describe what they’re feeling at that moment with that level of calm certainty. If they do, something is very, very wrong, and it pings a sense of urgency that you don’t always see in the ER, even when someone’s sitting in the corner holding their detached finger on ice.

Sorry. I feel like this is a lot of inane repetition on my part. But hopefully, it helps somewhat. It really is such a unique experience words can’t do it justice.

It’s easy to forget that the brain processes a lot of information we are not consciously aware of. That includes checking the status of our critical life functions, hundreds of times a second, every second, until we are dead. Your brain can very easily confuse a potential external threat with an immediate external threat, but one of your life functions failing is a completely unique sensation.

It would be very bad for our species survival if we couldn’t differentiate between danger/sickness/injury/etc, threats you have even a theoretical ability to respond to, and ‘you will die or you will be rescued. There is nothing else.’

If you live in the USA and you're pleading for donations to pay your rent, bills, or get food then dial 211! Please dial 211 before the last minute!

It's a toll free service with people who will help you find programs in your community to pay those bills, find food, and find housing! They will give you numbers to call so you can get help.

It is not 100% foolproof. Their job is to direct you to a program they believe will help your current issue, but it's still a step up from praying random strangers online will give you enough cash before a deadline! The added benefit of these community programs, which get funded by the local government most of the time, is if there are more people using them then they can get more money to help more people.

You're not taking resources from other people if you use your community services. Your taxes pay for them. Use them.

Dial 211 first to see if they can help, and if for some reason they can't, then make your donation posts!

https://www.211.org/

Hi I work for my state's 211 service. It really breaks my heart how many people only know to call us at the last minute. 211's can provide a whole wealth of resources to use before things ever get to a cut off utility, eviction, or homelessness!

I can't speak for all 211's but most should also have a website detailing all the agencies in their database. if you don't like phone calls, this can be something to reference instead.

If you don't have health insurance but you need to see a doctor, reference 211! We list clinics that provide free or discounted general care, vision, and dental services to low income households and people without insurance! Many hospitals also have financial aid policies that can severely reduce your bill if you had an expensive procedure!

If you're stuck in a dead end job or need educational resources reference 211! There are a lot of programs focused on providing basic adult education as well as trade skills or other high demand fields! State governments are generally more interested in funneling people into work than providing benefits, but you can still use this to your advantage especially if you have some form of disability but are still able to work. That includes if you're neurodiverse or have mental health issues! Most of these programs are extremely underutilized.

If you believe you qualify for public benefits but the bureaucracy of the process is in your way, reference 211! There are agencies specifically geared towards helping people obtain the benefits they qualify for- for free!

If you need help with your taxes-

If you need help finding a pro bono lawyer-

If you need help finding affordable housing/section 8 housing-

If you need help finding food pantries-

If you need help paying for your prescriptions-

If you need help obtaining disability aids or assistive technology-

If you need help finding transportation options-

If you need help following a natural or personal disaster (like a home fire)-

If you need help repairing a home you or your family owns or it needs modifications to be accessible-

If you need Queer resources-

Reference your 211!!!!!

I had no idea what 211 was before working for it but I wish I had. I've learned so much about what resources are actually available to the community even in a ho hum area of the country like my state. I've saved my partner literally thousands of dollars just from the medical resources I've gathered.

Not enough young people know about or utilize these services but they are there for you!

P. S.

This isn't an intended use of 211, but I like to reference the agency listings when I look for jobs. Many of the agencies listed are non-profits which, while they certainly are not perfect, generally have lower barriers of entry to decent paying jobs with benefits. The work environments tend to be much kinder and at least pretend to be forward thinking. You're more likely to find jobs without as many people applying as well, especially if they're only advertising their positions through their own website.