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Oof, this one hits hard in an asexual way too. I was in college before I learned that women can actually want and like sex with men, that lie back and think of England wasn't the way all women thought about it. I'd picked up from novels, movies, and other media that men could and did have the (almost) uncontrollable urge to have sex with anything they could stick it into, but that a woman might like sex with a man was utterly unfathomable to me until my first roommate started bringing her boyfriends over for the night. That was when I started realizing that hrm, wait, maybe I should take a closer look at that assumption because I finally had a real life example of a woman who really liked sex with men so maybe it was me who just wasn't into it.

When I was a kid, I didn't know trans men existed. I thought that nobody actually likes being a girl, that's just something that unfortunately happens to you, and you just gotta suck it up and pretend to be happy about it. Something vaguely about how it'd be shameful to admit you'd rather be a man because that's not The Feminist Stance, you just gotta grit your teeth and endure that shit and insist that you prefer it that way.

When I first learned that female-to-male transitioning even exists at all, my first thought was to wonder "why hasn't every woman done this?" How has this been kept secret so well that all women haven't flocked to transitioning if that's a thing you can do?

It was only over years that it actually sunk in that yeah no, women really do just want to be women, like genuinely. For the first 12 or 13 years of my life I wasn't aware that trans men exist, but in a more vague and unaware sense, I did not believe that cis women exist.

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As a non-binary person the concept of actually feeling like either a man or woman was/is totally foreign to me. As a kid that manifested in confusing everyone around me because I was equally interested, and disinterested, in things that were stereotypically gendered. I saw no reason why I couldn't like both sewing and woodworking, why I couldn't work on cars and like plushies.

When I was in my early 20s I dressed as androgynously as possible out of a desire to have the freedoms that I saw men having. I never wanted to be a man, what I wanted was what they had in the late 90s and early 2000s. A lot of that was because I was part of the Pride community at university and what I saw there was gay men and trans women being celebrated and held up while lesbians were still considered as cis man erotica and trans men weren't visible at all. So even in the Pride community I was a member of all I saw was that being associated as a man, even in past-tense, conferred privileges and freedoms that women didn't get. Such as the ability to change genders - I knew multiple trans women and yet knew no one who identified as a trans man or was out as one despite hearing over and over again that the women around me wished they were men for varying reasons.

My last year of college I saw the Vagina Monologues performed with about a third of the women presenting being trans women. And it confused me, I was very happy for them because it made them so happy, but why would they be celebrating having all the hardships of being a woman? I asked a trusted friend after the show about it and that's when I learned for the first time that people do actually have deeply held gender identities, that it wasn't about the freedoms and privileges of being one gender versus another. That left me shook, there were people who actually knew deep down if they were a man or a woman? How, how was that possible?

So I dived into research, asked awkward questions of trusted people, and now in my 40s I have a much better idea of how gender identities work. About how people can know if they are a man, woman, enby, or any other gender or lack of gender regardless of their genetics or genitalia. I still have conversations with trusted friends, cis and otherwise, to try and get the points of view from people who do feel a strong gender identity so I can better understand them. They have the same conversations with me, to understand how I can be lacking what they so deeply feel themselves. It's not about freedoms and privileges anymore, it's about who we are inside first and foremost, the voyages of self-discovery, and the really awkward conversations with friends where everyone regardless of gender or body arrangement agrees that having a dick is far preferable for convenience when peeing outdoors.

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Dragons?

goblins were not immune from to medieval humanoid urge to call anything too weird to be immediately categorized a dragon. here we have a selection of beings you'd find populating the illuminated manuscripts of older tomes as they are, and not as they're depicted after being seen once and passed from village to village via wandering storytellers. they are:

1: a Riven- not a dragon. these rarely seen beings are roughly described as a mix between selkies, mammalian mermaids, and water spirits. deep in the supernatural category of mythological sea creatures, but not quite incomprehensible horror tier. like, they're spooky, but fully comprehensible.

2: a Fairy Wring- actually a dragon. these smaller dragons resemble either haphazard mushroom clusters or jellyfish depending on who you ask, but they're closer to cephalopods. they freely show other sapient creatures their hoards because they don't care about bits getting stolen. you probably won't be able to get away from wherever they spirit you away to without their help, and besides, everything ends up back in the sea eventually. even you. they just have to wait :)

3: a Silky Hydra- not a dragon. it's contested on whether it's even a true hydra. when a head is severed from the main body it seemingly awakens from death with its own fresh consciousness and sprouts a new body, which is closer to reproduction than a splitting limb. heads still attached to the main body think and move as one creature, but the "hatched" heads clearly act like separate individuals and are carried back to the Silky Hydra's nest to grow until their new bodies are big enough to set out on their own. the damaged neck stumps close quickly, and new head buds develop within a few weeks.

4: a Dryvern- actually a dragon. much like Rivens, they're rare and more on the supernatural side. despite having no wings and an abstract body plan, they are commonly found in places they should only be able to get to by flying, surrounded by vegetation thriving in strange, unsuitable conditions.

5: a Lapidrairy- unknown. often found in the abandoned hoards of dead dragons looking for...something. other dragons stay away from them, looking away and going still if one comes near. they will not say why.

6: a Fulgrace- actually a dragon. these flying serpents appear during storms, causing strange lightning phenomena. they relish in being struck by lightning because it removes harmful parasites, and the excess energy is stored in their ever growing antler-like sensory organs for future use. they communicate through crackles, pops, and deep electrical hums that are clearly understood by other sapient beings no matter their language. the sound doesn't actually matter, it's just the audio result of them messing with the electric signals in your brain to make you perceive whatever they mean.

7: a Queendrake- depends on who you ask. these are the adult forms of a specific kind of mandrake root that emerges from the ground every hundred years in one large haunting chorus. researchers fight over whether these mysterious entities are dragons, dryads, or the result of cicadas evolving really really weirdly. no one has a solid answer because Queendrake are far more concerned with carrying out whatever business they have to attend to before they burrow back into the earth than explaining their biological quirks. dwarven and dwarven adjacent communities see them as minor deities, referring to them as Goddess Veins.

8: a Glass Dragon- actually a dragon. not actually made of glass. their strangely flexible exoskeleton feels like something that could be glass but it's much more durable. they're mostly called glass dragons because of their ability to modify their bodies into a vast variety of shapes and colors by either creating or finding furnace nests every year. these are used to soften and shape their new growth. Glass Dragons with access to a furnace can survive just fine for a while, but eventually their hides might start to crack as layers grow over stress points and internal organs might even become too large for ill-shaped cavities. personality wise, they are mischievous and creative creatures who like to befriend artisans. which just means they WILL find their way into your workshop so that they can plop down and watch your process. they say that this is a Muse Service and definitely not them adding to their mental technique hoard while freeloading.

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Saguaro redraw from some years back! good ol long cactus

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Stephen Vollo (American) - Strainer, Paintings: Oil on Canvas on Panel

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Long before the introduction of color film, a Russian chemist and photographer named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky used an innovative technique. He took three individual black and white photos, each through a colored filter (red, green, and blue), to create fully colored, high-quality pictures. The photo of this woman, taken by him, is around 107 years old!

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There’s a star near the center of our galaxy that’s moving so fast… it’s literally bending time.

Meet S62 the fastest known star in the universe. Nestled deep in the heart of the Milky Way, this stellar speedster whips around Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s supermassive black hole, at an incredible 24,000 kilometers per second that’s about 53 million mph, or 8% the speed of light.

That’s not just fast it’s relativistic. At that velocity, time slows down for S62. An hour near the black hole for this star would equal about 100 minutes on Earth, thanks to the intense effects of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

S62 completes one orbit every 9.9 years, but it doesn’t move in a neat ellipse. Its path precesses, or shifts, by around 10 degrees each orbit, drawing out a kind of cosmic spirograph far beyond what Newtonian physics can explain. It’s like watching Mercury’s famous orbital wobble, but amped up to interstellar extremes.

This phenomenon isn't just mind-blowing it’s scientific gold. Before S62, its sibling S2 held the record, helping confirm gravitational redshift during its close brush with Sagittarius A* in 2018. But S62 is faster, tighter, and even more extreme, offering an unmatched laboratory to test the limits of gravity, time, and space.

So while this star may be nearly 26,000 light-years away, it’s giving us front-row physics in real time proving that the universe still holds mysteries that only Einstein could predict.

Research from Florian Peißker et al., “S62 on a 9.9 yr Orbit around SgrA*,”* published in The Astrophysical Journal (2020). Observations via the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

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"graph function singularities exist as physical features of our world" I'm. I'm gonna need a moment over here while my inner image of reality rewrites itself.

the cultural object of the black hole is kind of remarkable. It's almost an anti-God in a sense, a negative infinity. Yeah there's this kind of dead sun that's collapsed into an infinitely dense point, and if you fall past its event horizon you're fucked. Every schoolchild knows this. A black hole can be introduced in a superhero blockbuster without any explanation except for its established look and the name "black hole", and this will be understood as the ultimate natural disaster, which even superman could not hope to defeat. truly S-tier cosmic object

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Pokemon headcanon that once Absol are studied and people realize they prevent disasters instead of causing them, particularly dangerous workplaces get themselves a workplace Absol and it also decreases accidents.

Construction sites and fishing ships and factories will have one that pretty much just lazes about until it just gets up howling one day and knocks a dude down. They almost never figure out what would have happened but they're always like "yes absol thank you absol I am so grateful to be on the floor right now. Can I offer you a treat in this trying time"

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every time I see something sold in a collectible metal tin I’m like “oh great, more storage for my sewing and crafting supplies in.”

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as a fat person who's always clamoring for more interesting fat characters in media, I honestly think one of my all-time favorite depictions of a fat character is Jumba from the original Lilo and Stitch - both visually and personality wise

from a design perspective, even though he's an alien, he has so many little anatomy quirks that make him a more believable fat character than many fat human designs in other media. I love the realistic sag and layering of the fat on his arms, the lack of neck definition, the rim of chub around his face and upper back, the way his back is rounded. his clothes pull taut and pinch in anatomically accurate places (e.g. shoulders are firmer = smoother outlines, the sides and back are squishier = bumpier outlines).

and he's stylized so well! all these great details boiled down to some simple shapes and pen strokes. IMO the Lilo and Stitch art style is extremely appealing - it's warm and clean and visually pleasing, but every character is super unique. Jumba isn't supposed to be pretty, but even though he's a very large, very fat, bald older guy who spends most of the movie in crop tops, the way he's stylized and staged makes it clear the audience is supposed to find him interesting to look at, and variably intimidating/cool/powerful/capable. he's often funny, but the physical aspect of his comedy is derived from being so hefty the other characters struggle to prevent him from barreling ahead and doing whatever he wants; being fat makes him come off more in control of the funny situations he gets into, not less. also, because the art style is what it is, a lot of his character acting also just makes him look kind of cute ... though that's universal across the cast

I also really like the fact that his size clearly gives him both realistic advantages and realistic disadvantages. along with having a stronger sense of agency in the comedic scenes, his size in combination with his impulsivity also makes him a more intimidating antagonist. you never know what he's going to do, and his size makes it difficult for other characters to stop him when he's made up his mind. at the same time, it seems to take him longer to catch his breath, he sometimes grunts when moving around a lot to imply it takes more effort, and he clearly struggled to find clothes that fit him when putting together his disguise. I think it's awesome that the character's size impacts how he interacts with the world so much, and again, in relatable ways

and personality wise, it is ALWAYS great to see fat characters portrayed as intelligent - not only is Jumba an accomplished scientist, he's also crafty and witty! a few quiet scenes imply a philosophical side, as he ponders on Stitch's existence and feelings as a living weapon. with Stitch explicitly being made in his own image to an extent, I'd argue there's even room to interpret some of the things he says about Stitch being hints to how he sees himself; we never learn much about Jumba's past, but it's clear he's a social misfit and strongly defiant. I don't think it's a stretch to assume some of what he said to Stitch about being a monster who can never belong anywhere was intended to read as projection (which makes it all the more heartwarming when both of them find a place to belong on Earth)

it's also a nice twist that toward the end, Jumba is the one who is unexpectedly compassionate toward Nani, while Pleakley tries to urge him to ignore her. again alluding to a level of emotional depth and intelligence that is often missing from even well-intentioned depictions of fat people. his character isn't even fully explored, and yet he's one of the most dynamic and interesting supporting characters in a movie full of fantastic characters. the audience is expected to find him fascinating and even sort of mysterious, and he is!

the sequels and spinoffs were more merchandise-driven franchise fluff for kids than the artsy direction of the original movie, but even so, I remember Jumba went on to become Lilo's lovable, amoral uncle figure, which I also thought was so fun as a kid. I love that they committed to the fact that he was more caring and compassionate than he seemed. not only was he a cool evil mad scientist character, but he was also eventually ... a friend ...

and he was even gay

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Calcite, ChenZhou, Hunan Province, China, photo by Paul Bordovsky

UV light vs visual spectrum

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WALLSCROLL MEGA-SALE!!!

I am moving from California to Sweden and can't bring these big scrolls with me, so everything is on super sale! These scrolls will never be in stock again so this is your last chance to get them! Signatures are free upon request during check out :) Get them before they're gone forever at YuumeiArt.com/shop

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Breathtaking work from @embroiderybynusik on Reddit and Instagram