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i am not taking questions at this time

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Rei Kamoi (1928 -1985)

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Crossings by Walter de la Mare, 1923, Dorothy Lathrop

https://www.wikiart.org/en/dorothy-lathrop/crossings-by-walter-de-la-mare-1923

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some things that help me avoid picking:

putting a non-comedogenic  oil or thick moisturizer on so your fingers literally slip off if you try

wearing gloves so even if you touch your skin, you can’t feel texture as much and can’t really squeeze

using a face mask that can be left on for a long time, cause they help your skin and hide bumps/redness/spots AND remind you not to touch

similar, but try those little stickers that you put on spots, cause they stay on super well, help encourage healing if there’s actually a spot there, and make it harder to pick

set a timer when you’re going to the bathroom/going to be near a mirror, so that it can go off and interrupt you if you start to pick

put post-it notes on your mirrors reminding you not to pick

reward yourself or just celebrate every time you don’t pick or pick less

if you’re competitive, try keeping a tally of how long you can go without picking and keep trying to beat your record

get rid of any magnifying mirrors you have

same for any blackhead extractors or tools you use to pick, even if that includes tweezers or things with other purposes

credit to my psychologist for this one: remind yourself that picking may or (more likely) may not help the spot, but it will DEFINITELY feed your dermatillomania

don’t be afraid to reassess techniques if they stop helping you! sometimes taking pictures of my skin helps remind me that picking makes my skin worse and keeps me accountable, sometimes it just makes me obsess more over my skin 

not my quote, but someone wrote that if you stumble going down a flight of stairs you don’t give up and throw yourself down the rest of the way, you stop yourself, regain balance, and keep going. same thing applies with picking; if you do pick, don’t tell yourself “fuck it, might as well keep going since i already messed up”

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me, starting a new game: i’m gonna be evil this time

me, 5 minutes into said game: Being Mean Is Not Nice

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Old!

Bukbot, did the Great Egg! Your needs are met.

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pale rider

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World’s Oldest Wild Bird Returns to Midway!

Wisdom and her egg on Midway Atoll in 2018. Photo credit  Madalyn Riley /USFWS

Wisdom, a Laysan albatross and world’s oldest known, banded bird in the wild has returned to Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge and Battle of Midway National Memorial! 

She first appeared back at her traditional nest site on November 29 and biologists on Midway have confirmed that she has laid an egg.  Wisdom was first banded as an adult  in 1956, and although she is at least 68 years old, she is still laying eggs and raising chicks.

Wisdom and her mate Akeakamai return to the same nest site on Midway Atoll each year. Albatross often take time off to rest between egg-laying years, but the pair have met on Midway to lay and hatch an egg every year since 2006. 

Keep reading

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The Pulp Scifi That Inspired the X-Men

I wrote before about the sources of inspiration behind King Kong and Conan the Barbarian, as both of these were so far back in time the things that inspired them are not really read much.

With the X-Men, it’s important to remember that a subgenre of science fiction once existed about mutants who we identified with because they were persecuted and feared by normal humans, which allowed authors to use science fiction to explore the idea of alienation. X-Men is a part of this trend, and seems unique because it’s the only one from this long-standing trend that is actively discussed today. Really, this is a kind of story all people who feel gifted or alienated are compelled to create.

Slan by A.E. van Vogt

Slan is a story about Jommy Cross, a young boy who watches his parents die in front of him in the first chapter, hunted by the government because they are a telepathic, superintelligent and superstrong subrace of humans with antenna on their heads known as Slans. Slans are hunted to extinction by the corrupt government ruled by the world dictator, Kier Gray. Jommy has to go into hiding, wearing a hat to hide his tendrils.

It’s a good bet that if you think about other planets a lot, it’s because you think this one is somehow a painful and unsuitable place to be for you. Slan is an extraordinarily well written novel that is still intriguing and mysterious even today, it always tops my list of recommendations when people ask me about pulp scifi because it absolutely holds up. What makes it so important is that scifi fandom responded with an unusually strong sense of identification. The circumstances and history of the Slan are not exactly like that of outsiders who are ostracized and “different,” but we relate to emotions, not specific life details. A lot of people who were homosexual, who’s parents are drunks and like to beat them, who were sexually abused, or extremely poor and alienated from richer peers, or just “on the outside looking in” can relate to the Slans. Scifi fans, who’s culture was incredibly fringe, called themselves “Slans” for years in fanzines an fan communications.

It’s no exaggeration to say that for the 1940s to the 1950s, Slan was the most beloved and widely read and influential science fiction novel, and maybe one of the best, too.

 Mutant (aka the “Baldies” stories) by Henry Kuttner

Maybe one of the best of scifi’s forgotten geniuses of the 1940s, Henry Kuttner’s Baldies books are actually a post-atomic story, about a community of telepathic mutants known as “baldies” who hide away from a human race that fears and hates them. All Baldies were linked in a telepathic uni-mind, so none of them were ever alone. The narrator is the last surviving member of his species; the enemy is the prejudice and paranoia of the self-destructive human race.

Children of the Atom by Wilmar H. Shiras

The idea of a school as a setting where mutant children can get refuge and hide from a prejudiced world that doesn’t understand them comes from this book. 

In this one, due to atomic radiation, a sub-race of superintelligent humans emerges. They don’t have any mental powers except their superintelligence. The Children of the Atom take refuge in a school who’s true purpose is unknown. In the finale of the book, a human preacher leads a mob to the door of their school, which makes the Children realize they can’t isolate themselves from the rest of mankind.

 Odd John by Olaf Stapledon

Olaf Stapledon used to be a big deal. He inspired Asimov, C.S. Lewis, and Heinlein with his extraordinary “Last and First Men,” a story set over a billion years about the entire sweep of human history. But one of his more interesting novels was “Odd John,” a novel about the first “evil mutant.” Odd John is a charismatic and sometimes truly creepy antihero, an unusual mutant born ahead of his time; he switches between sympathetic and monstrous. We see his brutal mistreatment at the hands of the human race, but then see him use his powers on women in eerie ways, and see the hardened person he became, who created an island kingdom and base separate from the rest of the human race, a move that the evil mutants in Marvel, in imitation of Odd John, often did several times.

A lot of people identify the evil mutants with militant black leftists, but in the actual comics themselves, their worldview had way less to do with Marx and Malcolm X (as with “Dune is about oil,” that a giveaway someone hasn’t read it and just knows about it), and way more to do with some combination of Nietzsche and Captain Nemo. Like Nietzsche, their worldview is that traditional human morality doesn’t apply to them as another species. Each evil mutant is Nietzsche’s conception of the superman, elevated beyond good and evil and a “sovereign citizen” laws can’t govern. Nietchean “will to power” thinking is found in every single speech by Magneto. Likewise, like Captain Nemo, they are often driven by an urge for solitude in places they can’t be commanded by the small mindedness and petty tyranny of humans. Odd John combined both of these together: he was a Nietzchean superman who had a cruel disdain for ordinary morality, who’s strongest desire was to be left alone.

He That Hath Wings by Edmond Hamilton

 The Angel has a very specific point of origin: a wonderful and tragic story about a mutant born with wings by “Planet Smasher” Edmond Hamilton, who was always fascinated by notions of mutation and human evolution; he invented the story about the “guy who invents an evolution ray.”

The titular mutant is a man born with wings, who, when he falls in love, cuts them off to blend in with the normal human race. He loves his wife so much he gave up flight for her, but unexpectedly, his wings grow back at the end. He knows he has to get rid of them to blend into society, but he is allowed one last night of flight. 

Gladiator by Philip Wylie

Fans of Superman probably know this novel as one of the major inspirations for the creation of Superman (possibly THE major inspiration), with Hugo Danner, an artificially created mutant who is superstrong, invulnerable, and able to “leap tall buildings in a single bound.”

I’d compare Philip Wylie to Michael Crichton: he was the one “bestseller” scifi novelist at a time when scifi was ghettoized. His work was regularly on the best seller list, including “When Worlds Collide,” a novel that created the “disaster” genre as we know it today, and is still influential through it’s film adaptation.

Philip Wylie’s Gladiator didn’t just create Superman. The angst and anger over being in a world you never made was right there from the beginning. Hugo Danner was a misanthrope who’s attempts to help were stopped by a senseless and incomprehending mankind that feared and hated him. Like Slan, this is yet another novel from the past that is surprisingly readable and good today.

 The Humanoids by Jack Williamson

This is where the Sentinels came from.

To be clear: Jack Williamson did not invent the idea of robots who turn on the human race. But the very specific kind of robot the Sentinels are comes from the Humanoids, a novel about robots that take the instruction to protect mankind incredibly literally to the point they become dictators and ruthlessly command us, and battles consist of them adapting instantly to whatever strategies the human race uses.

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Malleus Maleficarum by Jacobus Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer The Hammer of Witches Translated by Montague Summers and edited with an introduction by Pennethorne Hughes London Folio Society 1968 [First Edition thus]

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Executive dysfunction gothic

- You have to shower. You cannot shower. You are standing right in front of the shower. You want to shower. You cannot shower.

- The meeting begins. “Did everyone see the email?” There is a chorus of nodding heads. You nod, too. You think you may possibly have checked an email account before, on one single occasion, at some unknown time, probably in a past life.

- You are hungry. You have been hungry for three days now. The hunger has not spontaneously resolved itself. How inconvenient, you think. How rude.

- You depend on your planner/calendar. You loathe your planner/calendar. You can’t function without it. You live in constant fear of it. It’s an unhealthy relationship. You think you both should start seeing other people.

- There is a pile on your floor. It is a treasure trove, the Room of Requirement. It has everything. You look for something specific. It has nothing. There was never any pile.

- There’s been a change of plans, they say. You don’t understand. They repeat: “there’s been a change of plans.” You don’t understand. The mere suggestion causes a buzzing in your head that drowns out everything else. You don’t understand.

- You’re in class and you don’t understand the lecture. You look back at your past notes. You look at a calendar. You have not been to class in two weeks. You have no memory of this supposed time. Where did it go? Why did it leave?

- “Organizational tips for success: Keep a planner! Write it down! Stick to a schedule! Make a list!” You are torn between deranged laughter and ugly crying. You choose both.

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And how would you define attraction? Do you see a discrepancy between finding someone beautiful and perceiving them as attractive? I know I do.

Attraction is energy, anon, and it’s powerful and it’s unexplainable and it’s domineering and I absolutely agree with you – quite often it has to very little with beauty in the classical sense of beauty. It’s conflicting and it’s puzzling and it touches upon paradox and chaos and it’s truly something undefinable because it does not exactly need a definition. Attraction I’d say is intense and it’s flowing and it’s never static and it’s a shared thing. It might not be a mutual thing but it’s a shared thing. It’s pulsating energy and absolution and it involves something of the “helpless” for me.

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My tag #negative capability indicates a kind of credo or core value, one that I continue to articulate and rearticulate on an ongoing basis, but essentially it’s about a kind of fundamental epistemic openness. Ur-selections follow.

Keats:

It struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…

Rilke:

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Aristotle:

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Russell:

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good. 

Jung:

Raise your hand up to the darkness above you, pray, despair, wring your hands, kneel, press your forehead into the dust, cry out, but do not name Him, do not look at Him. Leave Him without name and form. What should form the formless? Name the nameless? Step onto the great way and grasp what is nearest. Do not look out, do not want, but lift up your hands. The gifts of darkness are full of riddles. The way is open to whomever can continue in spite of riddles. Submit to the riddles and the thoroughly incomprehensible. There are dizzying bridges over the eternally deep abyss. But follow the riddles.

David Chapman on the fluid mode

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Penitent St. Mary Magdalene, Titian

Medium: oil,canvas

https://www.wikiart.org/en/titian/penitent-st-mary-magdalene

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some things only she knows.