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Happy Birthday Shireen Abu Akleh

Your legacy lives forever. You will be avenged. Your Palestine will be free.

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It's my birthday! 33 feels like a big one - hope the year ahead holds all sorts of fun, cool things. ♥🎉

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some original art i made after disappearing from the face of the (tumblr) earth

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"Why do you hate the shape of breasts in plate armor so much?"

Since people often ask “Alright, well this is fantasy!  Why can’t we have boob shapes in plate armor?!”  I decided to make a post about it.  My frustration has nothing to do with historical inaccuracy and I’m all for imagination and freedom— but I’d like to (very quickly) illustrate this for you:

I purposely over-emphasized the shape of the two spheres in the armor so you can really think about this. 

Look at the shape of the blue cups and the green line, think about the form of that on some beautiful ornate plate armor.  A female warrior is charging into battle.  In the midst of this, she trips!  Or is pushed over, or takes a blow to the chest!  So long as the force is on the front of her torso it really doesn’t matter for the conclusion:

She feels a sharp pain in her chest and hears the cracking of bone!  Oh no, what’s gone wrong?  Well she doesn’t have time to think about that, because she is now dead.

Her sternum just fractured, take another look at that green line, that’s where all of the pressure from any front impact is going to go because of the shape of the two blue cups made for her breasts.  The rest of the armor slides around your body, but because of the two cups for breasts that are often made in fantasy female armors, the pressure point is directly on the sternum.  The breasts are not going to stop the force of you falling onto them, and because of that the metal is going to push in and bash you in the sternum.

What does a fractured sternum do?  Why it goes right into your heart and lungs of course.

(that was the sound of all of my followers inhaling a sharp breath between closed teeth at once)

Here are three great solutions to the problem:

GREAT EXAMPLE OF FANTASY TORSO ARMOR THAT IS FEMININE BUT FUNCTIONAL:

It is usually possible to bind the breasts when fighting if they really are far too large to fit into regular looking armor (there’s padding anyway), but most women can actually fit into a similarly sized male counterpart’s armor quite easily.  Even if that’s the case, the armor can be made to have a curve to it without putting all of the pressure in one area, which was actually a style of armor for quite some time as shown here:

And don’t even get me started on the dreaded “Cleavage Window”

The “Cleavage Window” defeats the purpose of having any armor on your torso because it means you’re just going to be leaving open the vital organs the rest of the armor is trying to protect.

If people are going to protect themselves and not have much torso protection, invest in some blocking lessons, because the best defense is to not get hit at all.  There are also advantages to not having plate armor, and plate armor was often really expensive anyway.

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Can you explain this gap in your blog history

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nasa: we're going to shoot three rockets directly at the sun during the total eclipse. for study and research purposes.

me: oh cool

nasa: we have named the rockets apep. this stands for atmospheric perturbations [in the] eclipse path.

me: oh cool

nasa: apep is also the ancient egyptian deity of chaos and darkness, who ceaselessly seeks to extinguish the sun. we launch these rockets directly at the sun in the name of apep.

me: oh... cool?

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they used to make smackable technology. you used to be able to hit your tv when it didn't work good.

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I don't have any glasses for the eclipse someone relay it to me when it happens

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“Nobody’s going to want to sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours to get from New York City to LA.”

Me. I will sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours. I’ll sit on it for days. I’ll write and read and nap and eat and then do it all over again. I’ll stare out the windows and see America from ground level and not have to drive. I’ll see the Rockies and the deserts and cornfields and the Mississippi River and your house and yours and yours too. I’ll make up stories in my head about the small towns I see as we go along. I’ll see the states I’ve yet to see because driving or flying there is a fucking slog and expensive to boot. I’ll enjoy the ride as much as the destination. And then I’ll do it all over again to come the fuck home.

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@guerrillatech

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the way ivan aivazovsky looks at the sea…i think…i think that’s what love looks like.

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A.I. photos are flooding social media and contributing to an Internet where we can't believe what we see. Spotting A.I. 📷s is an important media literacy skill.

None of us have time to research every image we see. We just need people to notice BEFORE THEY LIKE OR SHARE that an image might be fake. If unsure, check it or don't share.

I've started drawing some comics explaining the basic of AI spot-checking and media literacy in the age of disinformation. Follow along here or on my Twitter.

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writing tip:

if you push buttons on a keyboard, letters will appear on the screen. and with that power you can do anything