Avatar

destroy your desk it's useless now

@silver-stargarden / silver-stargarden.tumblr.com

Silver, 30s. he???/they??? 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🔞 Aspiring storyteller and creative. I liek tarot. in fandom spaces since 2004. learn more about my interests and fandoms and projects at ✨️silver-stargarden.neocities.org✨️ my #fandom tag is required reading. a refusal to vote is a vote for the winner. the internet is for adults, not children. I block minors, no exceptions, so if you're under 18 save me the trouble and block me first.

quick linguistic history lesson. the term “woke” originates from african american communities to describe being “awake and aware” of the current sociopolitical climate. this term has been used since at least the 1930s. it wasnt until 2014 during the ferguson protests that the term entered the wider vernacular. mainly as a result of black twitter. and as is common with many things coined by the black community. it was repeated and commercialized to death to the point where now most people only using it mockingly. including people on the left. the point is. “woke” is not a bad word. the alt right wants it to be one.

obsessed with the way that gothic horror is about horror but never directly. it’s not horrific because there’s a haunted house and that’s scary, it’s horrific because the monster isn’t a monster, it’s your grief, your loss, your pride, your desire, your fear. the monster skulking in the shadows, the darkness at the edge of the woods, the haunted house that is too broken to be a home—those are manifestations of events that grabbed onto the fabric of time in a fit of abject horror and clamped down so tightly that they couldn’t keep moving forward toward resolution and eventual dissipation like they were supposed to. it’s all about the scared child and the mourning mother and the hunger in your gut and the little emptiness in your chest at the end of the day. those things are all little horrors but you can’t approach them directly to understand them, so gothic horror gives us these little metaphors and says “here play with these for a while and see what you find.” and all of those metaphors need someone to go back to childhood to release them. you have to care, and be curious and clever, and look for a way to heal the hurt. you have to be so achingly human to survive in gothic horror

Time for me to come clean about the obscure c-drama that was a big source of inspiration for Heavenly Tyrant lmao. It's called The Legend of Dugu and it's based on the Dugu sisters, who in history became empresses of three different dynasties. Qieluo from Iron Widow actually shares a historical inspiration with one of them, but in the show she's characterized very differently from how she typically is in popular consciousness. Her eldest sister Banruo (shown in this edit) is depicted as the more hardcore, ambitious one and gets entangled in a power struggle with the villain, Yuwen Hu. Their dynamic is IMMACULATE and contributed hugely to me writing Zetian vs Qin Zheng. Jeremy Tsui may not be styled as an edgy dark lord in this show like Dongfang Qingcang or Tantai Jin, but he very much embodies Qin Zheng for me.

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

  • there are 14 asks in my inbox from the last ~5 days
  • 9 anons, 5 logged in users
  • ALL 14 show pfps, including the 9 anons
  • ALL THE SHOWN PROFILE PICTURES BELONG TO THE 5 LOGGED IN USERS

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!

It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.

There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!

I took calculus my senior year of high school, and I really liked the way our teacher framed this on the first day of class.

He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”

“NEVER!!” the teacher exclaimed. “You will never use calculus in your normal, everyday life. In fact, very few of you will use it in your professional careers either.” Then he paused. “So would you like to know why should care?”

Several us nodded.

He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.

“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”

“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”

“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”

“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why lift weights?”

“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.

“Bingo!!” said the teacher. “It’s the same thing with calculus. You’re not here because you’re going to use calculus in your everyday life. You’re here because calculus is weightlifting for your brain.”

And I’ve never forgotten that.

THIS.

When it’s taught right, learning math teaches you logic and how to organize your brain, how to take a problem one step at a time and make sure every step can bear weight before you move to the next one.  Most adults don’t need to know integrals, but goddamn if I don’t wish everyone making arguments on the internet understood geometric proofs.

Scientific concepts broaden our understanding of how the world is put together, which does not mean that most adults ever really understand how light is refracted through a lens or why spinning copper wire creates electricity–and they don’t need to.  But science classes in general are meant to teach the scientific method: how to make observations and use them to draw conclusions, how to test those conclusions, how to be wrong and grow stronger from it.

History isn’t about dates and names of battles, it’s about people, patterns, things we’ve tried before and ought to learn from.  It’s about how everything is linked, how changing one circumstance can lead to changes in fifty others, cascading infinitely.  Literature is about critical thinking, pattern recognition, learning to listen to what somebody is saying and decide what it means to you, how you feel about it, and what you want to do with it.

Some facts matter: every adult should know how to read a graph, how global warming works, some of the basic themes and symbols that crop up in every piece of fiction.  But ultimately, content is less important later in life than context.

The good thing is, students who learn the content are likely to pick up at least some of the context, some of the patterns of thinking, even if they don’t realize it.  (The unfortunate thing is how the current educational system prioritizes content so much that a lot of students, and a lot of adults, don’t see the point in learning either, and teachers are overworked and held to standardize test grading scales such that it’s hard for them to emphasize patterns of thinking over rote memorization, etc etc etc, but that is a whole different discussion.)

I graduated high school with barely passable maths grades thinking “I’ll never have to do this again!”

Boy was I wrong, measuring with no modern tools if I managed to (archaeologically) set out my trench with 90 degree corners. The times I had to re-calculate knitting or crochet patterns to fit my body.

Having to calculate how much medication I’m allowed to take for my weight. How much fertilisation do I have to mix in the water for my plants/aquarium.

As a European, having to convert back American values back to the metric system. Maths is everywhere and being taught in high school has given me the tools to, best case scenario: find the literal solution. Worst case scenario: I at least know in what direction to look to achieve the solution.

This is a good reason to have scientific studies saying stuff like, "On average, trans people report happiness when they transition with loving family support and unhappiness when people dump acid on their head," like, yes it is intuitive, yes we knew that, but someday the study that is being passed around under the heading "water is wet," is going to be used to guide a court decision. And sometimes, when the the weather is fair and God smiles, it will result in some judge pounding the anti-trans arguments absolutely flat with a level of precise violence heretofore only seen in people making schnitzels, and that is a thing of beauty.

People don't actually grow out of their emo phases. People are forced out of their emo phases by employers who get a raging boner over controlling how their employees dress, cut their hair, whether they mod their bodies and so on

How many beautiful emo men would we have if not for the tyranny of the 9-5. How many strange goth women are trapped inside the performance of a clean girl aesthetic because she needs to be able to eat. How many people are wage slaves when they should be punks?

A lot of people are talking about what you are and aren't allowed to wear but I think that issue is secondary to what you are and aren't allowed to do to your body. Like "you have to wear a polo shirt and dress pants" fine as long as you're paying for the polo shirts and dress pants I now need to buy. Whatever. "You must have natural colored and clean cut hair, no facial piercings, no visible tattoos" now we have a fucking problem because I also have to have that hair face and body outside of the workplace. it's literally pervert shit I've met 24/7 doms less horny about controlling how their subs look.

You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.