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i'm such a big fan of laios using being well fed as proof that he's serious. like there's so many techbros & etc who will use not eating breakfast as proof that they're productive & just in general, the idea of being "too busy to eat" is getting more common (which is exactly what toshiro is doing here!) but laios is like. no. i'm so serious about this i'm thinking about what comes next. i'm so serious about this i'm making sure my body can do everything it can when i need it.

the fact that everyone in the party took care of themselves & carefully planned out their route & when they'd take breaks is what made them so successful. they always made sure to understand their limits

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I am in agony. I was already resisting the temptation to purchase a teacup demon custom from @itsthebeastpeddler since the eclipse (as teacup demons and coffee are the vices I allow myself in this life) but now you can get one with a UNICORN HORN—FUCK ME RUNNING

Anyway if I can’t have one right now, all of you go buy one for yourselves they’re the cutest things ever

#I need one in animus colors #weeps #I need $100 for a teacup demon stat #I’m saving to buy cat things but oh my GOD

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THERE HE IS IT IS CHEWYTEETH MY BELOVED. PLEASE REST ASSURED HE IS SO LOVED AND HAPPY, HERE HE IS WITH THE AIR PLANTS

He’s wearing a scarf because it’s been cold out!

Thinking about old beasts, have a Drawlloween 2019-2020 sampler

#the beast peddler #chewyteeth #teacup demon #teacup demon pup

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Bit telling that for years and years evangelical religious extremists have been allowed on university campuses with their bullhorns and horrific imagery where they harass students into physical altercations and when students complain to the university’s administration they just shrug their shoulders citing freedom of speech but when those same tuition-paying students start protesting against war and genocide they call SWAT

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Join Us For the Live Premiere!

To see the start time in your area, click here!

Today, we are going to time travel through the incarnations of the Doctor to better examine how Russel T. Davies' battles the inevitable with regard to one of the most iconic characteristics of the Doctor: Regeneration.

We also have a Patreon now! If you love our work and would like to support us, head on over here to gain access to behind the scenes goodies and squeakless videos! https://www.patreon.com/IdlescreeProductions

#doctor who #dr who #new who #10th doctor #14th doctor #11th doctor #12th doctor #russel t davies #come and check it out!!!! #idlescree #regeneration

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If you didnt believe Laios was autistic before todays episode i hope it clears that up for you

we were first shown his special interest, a very autistic trait to have. We get to see him indulge in his interest, we get to see him happy.

but this episode contains the scene that makes it clear Laios cannot understand social cues, tone of voice, sarcasm, or subtlety. He actively suffers socially with other humans.

Shuro is pissed Laios didnt pick up on the fact that he hated Laios, because he was being passive aggressive (at best, Shuro bottled up a lot of feelings), and said verbally he was Laios' friend. Laios takes things at face value, if someone says "im your friend" that's what he believes is true.

He hates that Laios "gets to be genuine". I hate the way he says that "gets" as if its a privilege for Laios. It's a privilege for Shuro who is nobility and has his behavior and emotions stifled. Laios doesnt understand that others are NOT genuine. he's not from that world.

that's why Laios asks "why didnt you TELL me?" and Shuro says it should have been obvious.

it was NOT obvious to Laios, not at all.

And also, that was who Laios thought was his FIRST friend on the island. he thought he made a friend, something actively difficult for him to do.

it devastated him to learn that he was wrong the entire time.

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Talen's Birthday, 2024

Somehow this one feels less of a big deal than last year. I dunno, maybe it’s because turning forty has been a big monument in my mind, turning forty-one feels just like turning forty again.

I had a fanciful idea that I could do something with the fact that 41 is a prime age; that I have turned 1, 3, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37 and now 41, and then I thought it’d be interesting to see if I ever turned a prime age in a prime year. Now, if you’re at all good at math you’d be able to point out that by being born in 1983, every year I turn an odd age, the year is even and vice versa, meaning that for roughly half the population at any time, they’re never a prime age on a prime year, since no even number is a prime.

It’s not a complicated math puzzle here.

Making a birthday post on my birthday doesn’t feel that special now. It’s not a milestone, it’s not important. Comically, because City of Heroes is burned into my brain, I do think of 41 as a level where you used to get access to your first Epic Power Pool choice (except now you get them at level 35, which is cool). It’s good though: This was a good way to fight the anxiety of the birthday. I remember when I turned 35 I had a real horrible moment thinking I was done, that I had wasted my entire life up to that point. I remember part of what made it okay was seeing Adam Savidan on Youtube, playing Magic: The Gathering and saying ‘I’m thirty five or thirty four years old and I don’t need this.’

A thing about Loading Ready Run that makes me feel a tiny bit bad is that it’s this big long project that a bunch of friends have been making and running for twenty years, as an ongoing hobby that became a job and then became an institution managing multiple people creating things. Sometimes I get sad thinking about how what got that big project to happen was, in part, two dudes with supportive parents and supportive school supplies in the late 90s were able to work on a project, together, for long enough to become very good at it.

How do you do something for twenty years?

Well, you start.

You start, and you keep working on it while you work on things.

The internet of today is poisoned. The internet of today demands you create for it, it wants you to produce Content. Your status updates, your pictures, your everyday drama, your existence, they are all things that are being fed into advertising machine to space out the ads in the name of being ‘content.’ It isn’t how it used to be. It used to be people had websites for their special interests, the interest being the primary thing. My first website I can remember was an Animorphs fanfiction space, and I remembered how when I stopped trying to host other people’s fanfiction, and instead just hosted my own, the one author I took down got sad at me. She was probably also like, fourteen like I was.

It used to be that people made things because they wanted to share them. It used to be that people were making websites and stories and web-novels and web-comics and diaries and blogs and vlogs and microgames and RPGs and they were making stuff. It was stuff. It was not for consuming in its own continual sense, it was not being part of a pipe of things that were fed to you, it was not content, it was a lot of different stuff and that difference gave everyone a reason to do things.

But now, it’s Content.

Now, your effort, your creative material, is being pushed into a single tube for four companies who suck and you know they suck and you don’t like them and yet you make things for them anyway. Because that’s where it is. That’s where the habit forms.

Arbor Day - The Lads // Arbor Day

Watch this video on YouTube

I’m fond of this song, Arbor Day by a band that can be politely described as ‘pretty good, for a Church choir.’ The song, very simply, is that hey, do you need a reason to make a change in your life? Well, today is Arbor day, that’s a good enough reason.’ It’s been an idea bubbling around in my head that yeah, Arbor Day is a nearly arbitary reason to make a big change in your life, but that may be all you need. Sometimes you just need something, anything to mark the psychological change between ‘before I tried this’ to ‘after I tried this.’

Here’s my request for you, on my birthday.

There is something you want to make. There is something you care about. There is something you are interested in trying. Today is a day to do that. Today is a day to even just describe a plan, or a hope. Do you want to write a book? Write a description of what that book is about. A series of books? Describe all of them! Do you want to make games? Start, download one of the programs you need to use today.

Don’t waste money on things for this post’s sake, but you know there are steps you can take to make things, and I want you to make them. I believe in a world where people make things because we like making things, I believe in a world of creative people playing with creativity, and I believe that the important thing of online spaces ie being able to share them.

So please, make something, and show it to me.

No matter how small it is, no matter how little progress on it you get to make. Just spend a little time today starting something, continuing something or finishing something.

I’ll be proud of you, no matter what.

I promise.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

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In theory I know rainbow shiners (Notropis chrosomus) exist and yes, they are very pretty. Especially in breeding colours.

But every now and again I’ll come across a video or picture and just catch my breath. I mean, look at them. That’s hardly fair that they look like that and exist on this planet.

I mean… just look at them!

Holy shit!

They’re like little gem-encrusted neon blips of pure whimsy.

Anyway, North American native fish species are criminally unrepresented in the aquarium world and these bad boys are pretty close to the top on my long, long, very long fish wish list.

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what a lot of people don't understand when they say "vibes" is that it's just a fancy way to say inherent biases and inherent biases are wrong sometimes

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A thing I've seen in way too many fandoms:

People have some legitimate grievances and points about how this fandom's way of looking at the series, its perspectives in meta and fanfiction, which voices get elevated over others, etc. shows a lot of some kind of real social problem: misogyny, racism and colonialism, queerphobia, transphobia, classism etc. etc. Great! Except this same group has decided that the ultimate evidence of this is just the lack of one specific ship they like, where the lack could be explained by misogyny/racism/etc. but also any number of other factors (including, nearly always, that it comes more from this group of people imposing a particular kind of Migratory Fandom dynamic that they like on a pair of characters who don't actually have that kind of connection or any chemistry at all in this particular work)... and as a result, they've kneecapped their argument unnecessarily. This very important conversation about how even a lot of progressive-minded people in fandom are still very limited by privileged, oppressive perspectives has now been reduced to a Ship War, and the people who probably most need to hear this message now have an extremely easy excuse to ignore it, even ridicule the people bringing it up in the first place.

Anyway, how about we all stop doing this. Especially because most of the most insidious issues with bigotry in fandom have very little to do with whether a particular ship, character, trope, etc. has enough or too many hits on AO3, and a lot more to do with broader patterns that recur across many different ships and genres and fandoms - problematic ones and "healthy" ones, white cishet couples and POC/POC or interracial gay couples, trans4trans and trans/cis and cis/cis couples and genderbent cis/cis couples, all of them. It's rarely the lack of one specific shipping combo that's a problem.

Among other things, I think it's borne out of this fandom mentality that treats shipping as a default approach to media. Which is, of course, perfectly fine if you're just having fun, but is an ultimately limited way to approach media analysis since in plenty of works, romance is just not one of the narrative goals, or the romance that is there is not with the aim of being "shippable" in a way that fits your personal tastes. This also fails to recognize that plenty of marginalized people out there who like media and analyze it and are concerned about issues of representation, are pretty indifferent to shipping! By making "but this one ship isn't popular enough" your hill to die on, you're not just alienating the other people in shipping fandom that you've demonized as X-ist for disagreeing with you - but also many other people marginalized on the same axis who are not going to notice it because they're not watching the show via shipping goggles. And who are obviously going to resent the implication that they have some kind of false consciousness in not seeing this ship. A lot of those people, however, are open to the conversation about how the way that fanfic fandom writes that ship (or doesn't write it, or writes other ships) has some issues that reflect underlying misogynistic/colonialist/cissexist/etc. attitudes!

But making "supporting this one ship" your hill to die on nearly always distracts from your actual point, and gives people of all identities a convenient excuse to refuse to listen to said point. They're not going to dig down into the depths of your argument when they hate so much of what they see on the surface.

Take a cue from the music world, as musical tastes - like tastes in shipping - are also extremely subjective and personal and rarely an indicator of someone's intrinsic politics: You can condemn broader attitudes around a particular media thing's reception without suggesting "you need to like this music/fanfic/etc. or you're a bigot." There are still some people who will act like you're automatically doing the second thing, but many more will be open to it, and it's almost always a more productive conversation that, most importantly, gets at what the actual problem is.

I've seen this in so many forms across many fandoms. "Shipping this man with another man instead of his canon female love interest makes you a misogynist." "Actually, it's preferring him with the woman over the man that makes you a homophobe!" "This show is homophobic and queerbaiting for not getting this specific M/M or F/F couple I like together, never mind those other canonically queer characters over there." "Shipping this POC with the other POC they actually have chemistry with over this interracial pairing with a white person that I've decided is 'better' for some reason means you must think POC aren't good enough for white people." "Actually we've decided that POC/POC couples are the more antiracist option now, so preferring this black character with the white person they actually have chemistry with over this random black character..." This is all so pointless and so self-defeating! It's almost never what the real issue is. Even when there is an insidiously racist/misogynistic/etc. attitude that you notice in a particular fandom's shipping patterns, you can still make it about broader patterns rather than the lack or presence of one specific ship. People will be more receptive and you'll be naming and diagnosing the actual problem. Win-win.

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You don’t have to pay for that fancy worldbuilding program

As mentioned in this post about writing with executive dysfunction, if one of your reasons to keep procrastinating on starting your book is not being able to afford something like World Anvil or Campfire, I’m here to tell you those programs are a luxury, not a necessity: Enter Google Suite (not sponsored but gosh I wish).

MS Office offers more processing power and more fine-tuning, but Office is expensive and only autosaves to OneDrive, and I have a perfectly healthy grudge against OneDrive for failing to sync and losing 19k words of a WIP that I never got back.

Google’s sync has never failed me, and the Google apps (at least for iPhone) aren’t nearly as buggy and clunky as Microsoft’s. So today I’m outlining the system I used for my upcoming fantasy novel with all the helpful pictures and diagrams. Maybe this won’t work for you, maybe you have something else, and that’s okay! I refuse to pay for what I can get legally for free and sometimes Google’s simplicity is to its benefit.

The biggest downside is that you have to manually input and update your data, but as someone who loves organizing and made all these willingly and for fun, I don’t mind.

So. Let’s start with Google Sheets.

The Character Cheat Sheet:

I organized it this way for several reasons:

I can easily see which characters belong to which factions and how many I have named and have to keep up with for each faction

All names are in alphabetical order so when I have to come up with a new name, I can look at my list and pick a letter or a string of sounds I haven’t used as often (and then ignore it and start 8 names with A).

The strikethrough feature lets me keep track of which characters I kill off (yes, I changed it, so this remains spoiler-free)

It’s an easy place to go instead of scrolling up and down an entire manuscript for names I’ve forgotten, with every named character, however minor their role, all in one spot

Also on this page are spare names I’ll see randomly in other media (commercials, movie end credits, etc) and can add easily from my phone before I forget

Also on this page are my summary, my elevator pitch, and important character beats I could otherwise easily mess up, it helps stay consistent

*I also have on here not pictured an age timeline for all my vampires so I keep track of who’s older than who and how well I’ve staggered their ages relative to important events, but it’s made in Photoshop and too much of a pain to censor and add here

On other tabs, I keep track of location names, deities, made-up vocabulary and definitions, and my chapter word count.

The Word Count Guide:

*3/30 Edit to update this chart to its full glory. Column 3 is a cumulative count. Most of what I write breaks 100k and it's fun watching the word count rise until it boils over.

This is the most frustrating to update manually, especially if you don’t have separate docs for each chapter, but it really helps me stay consistent with chapter lengths and the formula for calculating the average and rising totals is super basic.

Not that all your chapters have to be uniform, but if you care about that, this little chart is a fantastic visualizer.

If you have multiple narrators, and this book does, you can also keep track of how many POVs each narrator has, and how spread out they are. I didn’t do that for this book since it’s not an ensemble team and matters less, but I did for my sci-fi WIP, pictured below.

As I was writing that one, I had “scripted” the chapters before going back and writing out all the glorious narrative, and updated the symbols from “scripted” to “finished” accordingly.

I also have a pie chart that I had to make manually on a convoluted iPhone app to color coordinate specifically the way I wanted to easily tell who narrates the most out of the cast, and who needs more representation.

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Google Docs

Can’t show you much here unfortunately but I’d like to take an aside to talk about my “scene bits” docs.

It’s what it says on the tin, an entire doc all labeled with different heading styles with blurbs for each scene I want to include at some point in the book so I can hop around easily. Whether they make it into the manuscript or not, all practice is good practice and I like to keep old ideas because they might be useful in unsuspecting ways later.

Separate from that, I keep most of my deleted scenes and scene chunks for, again, possible use later in a “deleted scenes” doc, all labeled accordingly.

When I designed my alien language for the sci-fi series, I created a Word doc dictionary and my own "translation" matrix, for easy look-up or word generation whenever I needed it (do y'all want a breakdown for creating foreign languages? It's so fun).

Normally, as with my sci-fi series, I have an entire doc filled with character sheets and important details, I just… didn’t do that for this book. But the point is—you can still make those for free on any word processing software, you don’t need fancy gadgets.

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I hope this helps anyone struggling! It doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Everything I made here, minus the aforementioned timeline and pie chart, was done with basic excel skills and the paint bucket tool. I imagine this can be applicable to games, comics, what have you, it knows no bounds!

Now you have one less excuse to sit down and start writing.

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i was blog diving and found this https://www.tumblr.com/thebibliosphere/652588226537717760/happy-two-year-anniversary-of-my-first-life

i know some foods have been better for you lately, have you gotten celebratory cake yet?

Many :)

Though now that you mention it. My five year anniversary of getting diagnosed is coming up. I think I’ll do some baking...

#I NEED THIS CUP

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Normally I’m a huge fan of people leaving reviews and comments on things. Really I am!

HOWEVER. If you are listening to an audiobook narrated by a feminine voice or has a female main somewhere, I am BEGGING you. If your comment is “omg I loved the main male MC but the female mc is SO ANNOYING” or “great plot but the narrators voice is SO SHRILL AND ANNOYING” honestly? Don’t post that. Please examine your internalized misogyny. I certainly had to when I was younger and I still have spots that come up.

And if you must comment negatively, consider helpful reviews such as: “the narrator mumbles and is hard to understand” or “their attempt at a British accent is not very good” or “the sound quality is horrible and the plosives blow my ears out. This sounds unedited”.

Specificity of experience is what makes reviews valuable. Saying “people with feminine voices are shrill and annoying” just makes you sound like misogynistic chihuahua.

The world has trained us to loathe feminine voices. Don’t let it win, especially not against the marathon runners of VA—or you.

#at that point your commentary isn’t helpful or useful #or indicative of anything #I have listened to hundreds of audiobooks #with voices of all kinds #some high pitched #others low and melodious #or smoky and rich #every single one of them had five thousand commends about how annoying the narrator is #most of these reviews are left by self identified women

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Twitter users are defending their right to assume Picasso was a renaissance artist. Tiktok users think watching any film made outside the US makes you a snob. “Replace classic lit with YA and fan fiction” discourse is flourishing. I think we’re just living in anti intellectual times.

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Congratulations to Marcille DungeonMeshi for achieving Pathetic Little Man status on tumblr, a hard glass ceiling for many female characters to break. I look forward to calling you my sopping wet beast and poor little meow meow for fandom days to come. Keep trucking babygirl, you'll bag Falin one day